Flushes For Dragons and Crabs
by HVK
Summary: A collection of Karkat/Terezi one-shots, as a storehouse for all my Karezi fics that don't fit into whatever longer stories I might wind up doing. Generally featuring WAFF, bizarre silliness Terezi being lots bigger than Karkat, some AUs, and shenanigans as the rule rather than the exception.
1. A Home For You

This one was originally written for Karezi week earlier in January, where each day had it's own theme; owing to the dearth of consistent Karezi work from the fandom as a whole, it was set up for a whole week of Karezi things for the starved fandom, but I was only able to do a couple of things for it. I decided to plan for a full-length story to make up for it, but in the meantime I'm posting the two fics I managed for Karezi week.

The theme of this one was 'Tree Houses'.

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck or any copyrighted fiction present in this story. This is a work of entertainment without any monetary gain.

* * *

The recycling drone crawled thunderously through the plains, tearing up lumps of dirt as it went. It was certainly possible to follow it's swaggering, wandering trail across the plains and see where it had been; it walked like it wasn't entirely sure how it was moving at all, and the trail left behind zigzagged in an uneven wave, the occasional rock or isolated skeleton in its way consumed for recycling and making it's path even easier to follow if you looked for empty space right through hills or lusus corpses.

It was a bumpy ride; a small balcony had been affixed to the back of the drone's low-slung abdomen, following the outer swell of it's shell. And over this was a thick canopy, essential in the daylight they were moving in; the sun was bright and high, but it shielded them from the sunlight, but they kept bouncing around; Karkat held to a shaft probably _meant_ to be a guard rail but made a good safety hold, staring grimly out across the plains through a sun visor shaped so that he looked like he was squinting angrily. Just as insurance, his compact body was totally shrouded in a heavy daylight cloak to protect him from _any_ sun burn or accidental overexposure.

Terezi was wearing a similar set of gear even though the sun couldn't do much worse to her: she had no desire to be burned any worse. She was also sitting next to him, and Karkat's lusus looming behind the both of them and one heavy leg curled around Karkat and Terezi. It still wasn't totally safe: the balcony had been adjusted to Terezi's height and width and not Karkat's, and since she was nearly twice his size, as a consequence his legs dangled dangerously above the ground while her's were fairly close to the ground. She sat a little closer to the back of the ride than him, positioned so that she could reach out and pull him back in an instant if she needed to. She hadn't mentioned any of this, and he hadn't complained about the arrangement; if he had a problem with it, or thought it was just her being a highblood that didn't think a weak lowblood like he pretended to be could take care of himself, he wasn't confident enough in himself to say anything.

Terezi couldn't _see_ anything, of course, but she was following Karkat's set of body and stance, and he was looking unhappily across the plains, to the smoldering ruins where his hive used to be.

She thought about telling him she was sorry for him, and decided that she couldn't think of a good enough joke for it or a way to say it at all without upsetting him. So she remained silent, and watched and waited.

Karkat kept looking in the direction of his old hive, glancing suspiciously at a few of the neighbor's houses they passed but mostly staring at his home. At the ponds and lakes flowing out of caves, the copses of woods he used to hunt in. Garbage piles laid high with the ruins of weapons and devices he cobbled together to trump his lack of physical size and strength that his blood promised he'd never have. Ancient bones and entire skeletons as big as an entire hive and older than any troll still on the home world, and even here he could see the little scratches and abandoned weapons left behind by newly limbed wigglers who had played there just as he had.

It was a whole lot of places he'd probably never see again. It would be too _dangerous_ now, this place wasn't home for him anymore.

Karkat lowered his head, a solitary whimper not stifled in time. He buried himself up in his cloak so Terezi couldn't hear him. She could _smell_ him though, the flush of his blood and the subtle changes in his eddies of pheromones. Not so much a change though, just something hidden coming out and being loud about it. She could feel him shaking a different way from the rickety balcony, just barely heard the muffled sniffling and buried howls. The huge crustacean lusus keened softly (and even soft his voice was a wailing high-pitch, a booming screech like some promise of violence even if that lusus didn't have a mean strain in his whole shell, and there was the secret of Karkat's personality all in one: loud and mean on the outside, sweet as candy on the inside, and just watch him deny it).

His lusus curled a leg around him. Karkat tried to adjust himself so he was nestled into the leg, like he could let himself be hugged and not feel so terrible, but he couldn't let _go_ without probably sending himself tumbling down onto the grass in broad daylight; they were high up enough that a fall like that could hurt. He shook inside that cloak, it was many sizes too big for him, and Terezi just _knew_ that he was crying under it.

Her insides twisted up. Everything she'd learned growing up told her that she should shun that weakness, hate it, _loathe it,_ smash it like a little twisted bug. She knew what she actually wanted, but the idea scared her, worse than what she was positive would be coming some day soon.

 _Go on,_ a not-quite-voice said somewhere in the back of her head, like the call of her lusus or the echoes of her own mind, grown great and mighty inside her like a promise of what she could be if only she was good enough for it. A mirror she'd never measure up to. _You know you want to help him. Hug him or something like that, do the sappy and gross thing. Be_ nice _for once._

Terezi felt small and weak herself. She reached a hand towards Karkat and almost instantly snatched it back the second she thought of him flinching or something.

Karkat, still trying to hide his misery under the cloak, didn't notice. His lusus did though, and turned a massive head towards Terezi. She couldn't see but she could _feel_ those big eyes, bony brow shading them like a scowl, stare intensely at her like blazing coals set into the side of a cliff. The mouth opened, a beak with teeth built into the sides, and keened urgently at her. She felt like something was being demanded of her, and the big crab gave her an insistent poke with a claw nearly as big as her whole torso.

She just knew those demanding eyes were red. No wonder Karkat kept that crab lusus hidden now that he was older and could hunt for himself; he couldn't risk anyone finding out that his blood was just as impossibly red. _Had_ kept him hidden, Terezi amended.

Even redder than her own shades, as red as the shades her ancestor had worn to look into the eyes of a dragon without being burned by them. Terezi swallowed, feeling in someway that not doing something as simple as following the commands of her friend's lusus was letting down her ancestor. Hesitantly, her arm felt up along the rail, jerky twitches inching along. Her claws touched against heavy fabric, nicking tiny tears in them, and her palm touched down against blazing bright heat, and she was cool enough that it was a shock to her. Not a bad shock, it was _nice_ and good and made her guts feel weird in ways that made her suddenly _really glad_ she was already sitting down.

She was touching his arm, Karkat's actual arm. She also felt Karkat's muffled cries subside, and his body stiffening in shock. She noticed, in a distant and bemused kind of way, that his arm was only a bit wider than her palm. Her fingers could close around the softness of his arm and her claws touch (though that wasn't so easy) and the smallness of him, especially in relation to her own size, made her feel suddenly dizzy.

He was so _small._ So easily breakable, hell the whole world was out to break him the instant they found out what he was; no wonder he'd turned all snappy in defense.

Karkat tensed. Terezi's hand was happy where it was, _she_ was happy with her hand on his arm, feeling his head and the contrast of his burning-hot blood, hotter than torture irons, against the coolness of her just barely high enough teal. It was probably forbidden, like that, and cull her on the spot but she _liked_ it. And she was absolutely certain that Karkat was going to scream at her to get away from him and she'd jump away from him in an instant, but she really didn't want to.

But she would, if _he_ wanted her to. It was only fair that he get that little bit of autonomy.

The cloak turned, a glimmer of light on the sun visor under the hood. Terezi felt the weight of Karkat's stare on her, hot and bright and fierce. But not angry, exactly. She heard his breathing stop for a moment, speed up when he caught it, and then calm down. She hadn't expected that; _no one_ in his position should calm down with a highblood clamped around their arm.

He did hiss, but it was entirely perfunctory, just a bit of hostility he was obliged to. He did seem uncertain, so Terezi swallowed what nerve she had and said, "I got you. So's you don't, I dunno, float off into the sky if you don't let your lusus grab you or something."

The fabric around Karkat's face wrinkled in a way that she knew his ridiculously pretty face was sneering at her. Not, she imagined, that his teeth were showing. There wasn't any more bite there than he had for anything else, really. Her grip moved, sliding over his shoulder and holding him firm. "If you're going to bother doing that," Karkat said, slowly and apparently choosing every single word with care not to give something away. "Then get closer or I'm gonna slip off."

"Smooth," Terezi drawled, scooting closer so that her hip bumped Karkat from side to shoulder with a little indignant squeak from him. "Pretty sure there's a law against flirting that bad."

"I heard that line in a musical," Karkat retorted (and squeaking slightly as she scooted fully next to him, her weight settling as she grabbed a rail to steady herself and put her arm entirely around him, shoulder flush around one side of his body and eclipsing him, holding him tight, and wasn't _flush_ just the perfect word for it). "That automatically makes it a _classic and you damn well know it._ "

She stuck her tongue out. It obscured the lower half of her face and some of the railing. "Please, I've heard some of the musicals in your library, classic is not the word I'd use!"

Karkat hissed, more in surprise than hostility. " _Holy hell on a gross-as-shit highblood art show how the hell do you fit that into your mouth!?_ "

Terezi stuck her tongue back in, adjusting her abnormally flexible jaws. "Legislacerator secret," she said blandly.

Karkat's lusus had silently watched the back and forth with a mysterious expression, as much as his inflexible face was capable of expression (and it was hard to tell exactly what goes on in a lusus' mind, anyway). It seemed approving now, and in any event Karkat had calmed down, he always got shouty when he was feeling better. (Not feeling good. He wouldn't be feeling good for a long time, now.) A rumble came from him and made the whole drone shake as they passed a hive, making the kid living there seriously nervous. If drones could have feeling about it, this one gave no apparent sign of caring about shaking like that. Terezi turned around to see the lusus scooting closer, the soft and fleshy underbelly pressing against them like a cushion and various legs thicker around than either of them pulling them in, anchoring and cuddling them at the same time. Huge claws snapped, dangerously close to Terezi's head.

Terezi became a paler shade of gray. "Aw, shit. Am I going to die?"

"Nah," Karkat said, a bit more muffled even than earlier because now he was leaning into his lusus' proffered leg _and_ Terezi as much as she was leaning into him. It was awkward to look at, like the slightest upset would put them both somersaulting off the drone. "He just gets grabby when he's affectionate."

"Oh." Terezi wasn't sure what to say about that. "Um. Good."

Both her and Karkat were feeling fairly sober about it. Every single bit of romance or other fiction published since the beginning of _time_ or something like that said what it meant when your flush's lusus liked you and got cuddly.

Flirting was fine. Helping was fine, and a sign of growing mature enough for real quadrant shenanigans. Someone else's _lusus_ welcoming you like it's own wriggler was serious business. Both of them weren't exactly comfortable with that kind of implication.

And in the brief gap of distraction, Karkat looked back to where his hive had been, far in the distance. He smelled alright; gloom radiated from him, sharp from sudden emotional shift, but not very deep or overpowering. "Miss my hive already," he mumbled, with a fresh rise of anger in it.

"Sorry," Terezi said without thinking.

"Why? You didn't do it." Karkat looked at her, squinting. "Or _did_ you? Is that it, Pyrope? Is this some kind of twisted scheme to get me into your claws and messed-up tree house, away from help and rescue? Oh, I see where this kind of thing goes, your script here is _completely messed up._ Freaking highblood fetishes."

Terezi chuckled nastily. "If it is, scheme's working good!"

Karkat snorted. He did give her a mildly worried look. "You... didn't actually burn my house down?"

Terezi blinked. "What?! No!"

"Oh. I figured." He moved at her in a way that at least felt somewhat guilty. "...Sorry."

"It's okay," Terezi said, mollified. She detected movement and turned her face in the direction of yellow; a mustardblood, one of Karkat's neighbors, and her scent built up an image for her; a hive, somewhat grander than Karkat's hive but nowhere as elaborate as her own tree house, and atop it a troll kid, older than her or Karkat, silently staring down at them with a general air of apprehension and surprise.

A tealblood carting off a presumed lowblood to parts unknown. She wondered how it must have looked. She also wondered if the troll looking at them had done it. Burned down Karkat's house while Karkat was lucky enough to get out and lucky enough to rescue his lusus from the wreckage, and quick enough to message Terezi. That was maybe surprise, Terezi supposed, that she had shown up on the scene with a drone to salvage what was left of his house and take what things he had left and leave.

It wasn't safe for Karkat here anymore. Terezi suspected that someone _else_ here knew what he really was. The threat he posed to the Empire's entire existence, the carrier of the same forbidden path that she secretly followed. Terezi idly thought about what sort of death would be appropriate for the troll looking at them if he was guilty; burning, probably.

Karkat shivered next to her. He _knew_ her moods. He did notice the troll staring at them and hissed angrily; the troll retreated from them, into the shade of his own hive. Karkat glowered and said, "Lucky bastard."

Terezi almost said that he should feel happy, he got to move into a _totally kickass_ treehouse, and some lingering shred of restraint made her stop. They were having a good moment here and she _really_ didn't want to be the one to ruin it.

They continued onwards, the carpenter drone eating anything stationary in it's way and it's mysterious digestive processes recycling whatever it ate as raw materials for future construction projects, particularly the one set out for it. None of that was thankfully alive, but Terezi somehow doubted that would have mattered to the drone.

And the trees began to grow taller, the trees around _them_ more numerous, and the foliage was thicker. The character of the land began to change, and as the two trolls did their best not to think about how their lives were going to have a big shift neither of them felt really ready for, the drone took them with it into the forest.

It was, geographically speaking, probably one of the more impressive forests on Alternia. The planet in general tended towards extreme environments, and the forest was _vast_ despite being a fairly temperate area, growing over a bumpy and ridged ground that Terezi privately suspected for being either a lost city or the site of a flogging jut that the Empress had wanted _forgotten_ and buried. It expanded over the size of a genuine city, like what Alternia had boasted until the Empress had commanded all trolls to serve on the fleet once they came of age. And it was still a peaceful place, huge but lacking in the kind of outright dangers troll children normally had to deal with. Alternia had become even more wild in the ages since the exodus of the adults; this kind of peace was highly unusual for a troll kid.

More than a little lonely, Terezi had to admit. Karkat was a lot more perceptive than he let on (though not as much as he pretended he was).

And before them was one of the largest trees in the forest, perhaps the biggest one; certainly it was the oldest, with a patch of sacred ground at the very center of where it grew, and higher than some communal hive stems. Around it's branches and the trunk, nestled in the canopy, was the different modules of Terezi's hive; more elaborate by far than any of the hives they had seen on the way up or the one Karkat had lost, it clustered around the tree like barnacles on a ship or the hives of ordinary eusocial insects, the windows yellow and access pulleys swaying extremely slightly in the wind. A number of chimes hung on the branches made a nice music; she'd hung them up to lure in the carpenter drone so it knew where to go, but it also happened to make a nice sound effect.

Karkat hadn't actually visited her hive before, though he'd seen pictures of it. "Holy shit, your hive is _huge_ ," he said, grudgingly impressed. He paused, noticing something else and squinted. "What are those little things up there...?"

Terezi cackled. "The wicked, dancing on air as befits their crimes!"

"What?" Karkat's lusus screeched a translation. Karkat looked up again and made a twisted up expression. "Gross, those are the toys you play with!"

Terezi shrugged. Dozens of scalemates hung from nooses overhead. "Don't disgrace them so lightly, Mr. Vantas, lest you join their numbers!"

"...Considering I'm _moving in with you,_ that was really creepy and ominous."

"I do my best," Terezi said, with a ghoulish grin like someone had mixed up the contents of a knife drawer and a shark tooth collection. Karkat didn't say anything, remaining quiet and a little pensive. Terezi's grin faltered. "I, uh." Aware that she was _still_ cuddling him and that didn't exactly fit the moment anymore, she started to draw away."

"Stop!" Karkat yelped. Terezi froze, and both her and him were still for a second. "Uh. If you _want_ to keep a steady hold so you don't fall off. I mean. That's cool."

Terezi put her arm back around the entirety of her body, and felt once more at peace. "Pfft. If you say so."

Karkat grumbled. "Don't complain just because you're super-clingy."

Terezi snickered at the blatant irony of that, which Karkat was probably also aware of. "So, still sure you won't miss living out with a whole bunch of other trolls."

"Probably." Karkat shifted uneasily against her. It was nice. "I just was thinking-"

"You didn't hurt yourself, did you?" Terezi put on a good act of mock concern.

"Bite me! What I _meant_ was that it figures, all those years of trying to get you into a proper lawn ring and mine burns down, and now I'm going into your freak tree house of creepy execution fetishes and roleplaying weirdness and who knows what kind of gross shit. The irony is _despicable!_ "

Terezi shrugged. "Them's the breaks, deal with it."

Karkat snorted, but left it at that. He did deal best with people who challenged him head on, or brushed his hostility aside like they honestly didn't notice it.

The drone stopped near her tree. "Here's our stop too," Terezi said, starting to heave herself off the ride. Karkat's lusus moved first, nudging his beak underneath the two of them and lifting them right off the ride and onto his head, and carefully navigated a way off it, slowly lowering himself and them onto the ground.

The two of them were then neatly deposited near one big root. Terezi hadn't noticed that she was _still_ holding Karkat; owing to the difference between their statures, he was now at least nine or ten feet off the ground and he wasn't even aware of it. Which was odd, considering his insistence on personal space, but it had been an bad day for him and that wasn't exactly on his mind.

In the meantime the carpenter drone was climbing up Terezi's tree, for a set of relatively near branches to build a new set of hive modules with Karkat's specifications (not an easy feat at all for them to get the drone to do, but Sollux had his ways of talking to the drone on its own language). The two of them watched it work, both of them having other things on their minds.

"...Terezi?" Karkat said after a moment, gravely.

"Yeah?"

"Um." He wiggled a bit in her arms. "...Thanks for letting me move in."

"No problem."


	2. But Is It Real

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck or any copyrighted properties that may appear or be referenced in this one-shot.

* * *

Terezi normally wasn't one to brood or sulk. She _was_ one to feel bad about herself or generally be uncertain, and she definitely knew that there was at least one thing she would _always_ be more than a little uncertain about.

Part of the reason she stuck around with _him,_ of course, was because it was always a little uncertain. It always stayed a little exciting, a reason to check back and see what might happen next. She didn't get bored and it wasn't a threat. It wasn't a need, but she liked the experience.

She tried to remember that as she sat at the edge of one particularly large branch, just thick enough to hold her weight. A little growth off the immense trunk at the center of her forest like the tree all the others had grown from, several others around it entwined in the general location of where she was sitting so that she felt like she was held in a fractal hand.

It was a nice thought. She couldn't remember _ever_ being held. It was hard to repress a little hostility and resentment when other troll kids talked about being cradled by their lusus like it was _normal._

She smirked, even so. Karkat might moan and whine about how touchy-feely his crab lusus could be when the mood had struck him. Always cranky and shrieky one moment, and constantly cuddling and nuzzling the next as the mood took him. (Trolls took after their lusii, it was said, and Terezi hoped that Crab-Dad wasn't also as spectacularly oblivious as that. Karkat might have even more growing to do in being observant.)

She wiggled her feet, tilting her face at a knobbly patch of marsh mushroom growing on a plate-sized bug that had seen fit to hibernate on the tree. Terezi wasn't especially interested in it, though she might later take a good sniff and let the smells tell her everything the bug had done and where it had been and what those places had known; she was leaning in that direction solely because she had to position her face somewhere and that was as good a facing as any.

Doubt squirmed in the back of her head. Like the brain-eating parasite called love had laid more eggs, and the eggs were hatching and okay she was pretty sure that was not a _good_ metaphor. A good metaphor, Terezi reflected, wasn't something you worked hard at. Just something that was there and you pointed out how it was. Like drawing lines around something so people could notice it the same way you did. Made a made-up thing a bit more real.

That was the problem. Terezi sighed, gloomily hunching her broad shoulders and not really paying attention to the branch's dangerous creaking as she hopped off to a lower, more sturdy branch. In this way she slowly started making her way down the tree.

And she thought about Karkat and the way she kept feeling persistently twisted up into knots but in a good way. The realm problem... yeah, that was the word. Not 'problem'. It was worrying about if she was feeling anything _real_ here.

And she thought about her problems. That wasn't something she did often, because she worried that her lusus wasn't always in a position to be able to listen, and she wasn't always comfortable talking about these even to her friends. (After the fall-out with Vriska, Terezi was supremely wary of opening up to _anyone,_ just in case it went sour later on.)

She was a little gloomy when she thought super-hard about the fact that for a while after she was done trolling Karkat (in several senses; talking to him, yes, obviously, and of doing her very best to wriggle into the secret touchy spots he barely realized he exposed _all the time_ and revel in that warm sweet feeling when he realized she'd gotten the better of him, that little moment was just plain gold because too often, he could get right past all her defenses, and not even realize he'd done it), Terezi always felt really good about herself and the world and everything in it.

Until the feeling went away and she started worrying about the specifics and the circumstances and how everyone would go wrong, the world felt... not golden, exactly (and trolls have different ideas for valuable things, she would one day tell Dave and John and the other humans who cared to ask about the differences between their peoples, and gold was not a pretty shiny wealth thing, but just a conductive metal shining like what poured from yellowbloods when they got poked too hard). But _good._ Nice and pleasant and everything smelling nice, even the things that itched in her sinuses smelled fine. Everything smelled good. It was hard to think of _bad_ things happening, now or in the future, even though she knew that they were probably pretty certain to happen.

Which made it worse when she thought about how they might happen.

It was inevitable. And the nice haze of kinda-sorta being in young love blended weirdly into the thrill she got from getting a rise out of Karkat, or the feeling that she was messing up somewhere in letting him bug her and let him get away with _knowing_ it. It was a _pitch_ feeling, vibrant and hovering in the back of her head like she was losing a race and she hadn't known it was on until she was already placing last. But another complication, when she hesitantly messaged him about her problems, her anxieties about being culled for blindness, or how she genuinely worried she _couldn't_ see things like lowbloods could because she'd never have to deal with the problems they had (and lack of perspective was an injustice on it's own, like a little festering sickness in the side of the law). And he answered back. Crankily, complaining the whole time, wrapping up his concerns and suggestions and soothing replies in layers of mild hostility. Words so caliginous you wouldn't see the diamond-bright _pale_ concern.

And of course, they were always drawn into each others relationships questions. Learning how the quadrants worked and trying to fill them up, working out how things really needed to go in real life, not the way tropes in roleplaying games and romantic comedies said they went. Sometimes things didn't work out, for them and the friends around them, and they had to intervene. Sometimes for each other. Terezi felt like at those times, the messaging system was a physical link between them, something they held tight to keep each other and their respective friends afloat. Sometimes it was clubs. Sometimes it wasn't.

Terezi had heard about quadrant vacillation and figured it would be ungodly _frustrating_ to deal with personally. She hadn't ever been told that sometimes, the person you were sort of crushing on was _all the quadrants,_ all at the same time. Not vacillating from flushed crushing to pitch rivalry, but flirting with you and egging you on _at the same time,_ in the _same actual sentence._

Terezi was pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen. She'd never heard of anything like that. Any responsible adult would see fit to have it included in the schoolfeedings. That was just _common sense._

(And of course, she can't help but see the truth. Even before the sickness is Vriska is laid bare to her and takes her eyes with it and provides her many excellent puns regarding eyesight or lack thereof, Terezi _notices_ things. She sees what other people might almost see, or don't realize they've already seen it. Their words and deeds and the thoughts behind them, their very mind, guide her to them. And the thread Terezi sees most of all is like a gnarled root, borrowing deep into the world and squirming with beetles. There is a plan behind it too, she sees the direction and the will behind it. And she sees lowbloods being squashed by everyone above and their resentment frothing into acid inside, midbloods getting worse from below and above, and highbloods driven into constant opposition with each other and unable to relate with lowbloods except as an oppressor so that it makes them too full of hate to change anything.

And Terezi understands. Alone in this forest, she can see clearly, especially after she cannot see at all. From here, she understands things no one else really grasps yet, though Karkat comes closest to pinpointing that _none_ of it really works, as though he feels the fundamental disunity of their world. He doesn't go as far as she does, and so she alone perceives the problem. Alternia is _sick._ It's empire rotten to the core, every world it touched and every life within it blighted by that sickness. And someone set it into motion, perpetuated this terrible _injustice_ upon their people and everyone they might ever meet.

Adults wouldn't think to make a note of quadrants not being as cut and dried as they should be. They expected kids to figure it out for themselves. Maybe it would make the kids stronger and smarter and better at working out relationships so it didn't interfere with their duties. Or they just forgot how this sort of stuff worked. Terezi thought expecting people to do the common sense thing was giving them way too much credit.)

Silently, aware of the distant colors of the moons overhead (the smell of the forest almost but not completely blotting them out, growing things and the insects living in them and the smaller plants growing on them, rotten meat and rank hungry beasts, seeds germinating on the wind and the living ecosystem of all the smells thereof, she could sit still for hours just smelling everything and go a little dizzy from the overload), Terezi touched the ground and slowly paced forward.

The heat blazed in front of her. She slowly approached it, felt the coolness of the vast metal scales, and placed a hand against the rock-solid shell of her lusus' egg. "I'm scared," she confessed, and hadn't realized she was going to speak until the sound of her voice startled her, croaking and rasping faintly. Like a musical instrument no one ever wanted to play anymore.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd spoken to _anyone_ when it wasn't visiting Karkat on her infrequent trips outside the forest, or going to check up on Tavros, or making the voyage to meet up with Nepeta for a hunting expedition and roleplaying scenario (usually both at the same time). She made a face: Terezi didn't _like_ the sound of her voice. It was creaky and deep at the same time, like a door with a sprained tendon, whistling in discordant times. Good for giving people a spooky feeling or surprising people when they didn't expect her, but still. She didn't actually like the sound of her voice.

Terezi didn't like a lot about herself. Left alone and not talking to anyone to suggest anything else, she didn't do very well.

And here and now, at this moment, those thoughts _burned_ away. Like skin under burning shackles. The presence, blazing like the sun all over again but in her head, she felt it peering right into her head and through her blood-pusher and push the bad ones away, clucking mournfully as it did. The tension and sick fear burned away, and Terezi did not feel better so much as she just wasn't as worried anymore.

Close enough, she guessed.

Terezi imagined a pair of great burning eyes, to match the mind lovingly joining her's. She had never actually beheld her lusus' eyes, even before the sun-gazing incident. She had only her ancestor's journals to give her an idea, and the glasses made in emulation of those same dragon-eyes. She imagined them staring peacefully into her own, and again she ached for her lusus to hatch so she could actually _feel_ something holding her.

It was selfish. Wanting the end of the world to come closer so she didn't have to feel lonely.

"I, um, I think I... y'know. Him." she said aloud to her lusus. Her jaws stretching as she tried to get into the spirit of talking aloud, deforming in ways that didn't look _natural._ Her teeth, heavy and sharp and triangular, clicked together painfully when she twisted a muscle wrong. A few words slurred, sounding off, and she worked her jaws back into shape. Convenient, too. She got to deliberately avoid saying anything sincere about it.

Terezi looked at the ground. She opened her mouth. Shaped the words in her throat. Let the truth flow out from her mind. Gathered the intent, sucked in air, readied the words ' _I think I really love Karkat'_ and it all just quit in a sad, disinterested sputter. All that she spoke sounded like a door folding in half because a cholera-bear had sat on it.

Terezi sat down and buried her face in her hands. This time she managed a long and drawn out snarl, frustrated and humiliated. "I'm sorry," she said weakly, and wasn't totally sure why.

The egg didn't move, but the light inside her head seemed to understand. She radiated encouragement to Terezi, who smiled a little bit. Close enough to a caring pat or something.

"I mean." Terezi sat up, her hands slapping on her knees; big as both of them were, it made an echo. "I, I, uh. I." She swallowed, gulped in, and made do with: "I _like_ him. A lot. I don't know if I wanna punch him or hug him or let him scrap the molt off my horns or, or... _oh god why I am talking about this, I am so sorry._ "

She started to get up, to run and go back up her tree and hide in her recuperacoon and stay there until maybe the sun had burned out three times over, maybe then she'd feel less like a culling shoo-in. Her lusus somehow radiated stern disapproval of that plan through the egg and while it was probably Terezi's imagination that the air shivered with heat, the command to sit still locked her knees tight.

As it took hold while she was in mid-gallop across the grass, the resulting muscular confusion somersaulted her into a tree only slightly smaller than Terezi herself was. (Not an unimpressive example: Terezi had rarely met trolls around her size, generally only indigo-bloods and the extremely occasional fuchsia-blood. She wasn't exactly happy with it, and sometimes worried if it indicated a cull-worthy mutation.) The dragon in the egg, if capable of coherent sentience, might have been radiating a feeling of something translating to 'oops'.

The tree fell over. Terezi fell with it. After some even more undignified scrabbling, she sat up, leafs raining down around her. She determined that this was because the tree's trunk was caught between her horns, and she tossed the offending plant away with an irritable twist of her head. The crashing noises made her smile.

On the plus side, the whole incident got her to sit still long enough for the lusus in the egg to determine a likely solution. She relayed it to Terezi.

"...I must have misheard you," Terezi said, clapping her hands to her ears. "I mean, it's mind-to-mind, but... I had a brain glitch. That's the only explanation."

The dragon transmitted it again, but louder.

"Oh no, ohhh nooo! Don't you say that again, that is a _bad_ idea!"

The dragon continued to make her point clear. With a bit more insistence; the psychic static was starting to make Terezi's forehead hurt. Or possibly that was where she had hit the tree.

"Please, come on, do _not_ make me actually do that, I can't!" Terezi stood up and paced around agitatedly, squeezing her hands so tightly her knuckles ached and her claws scraped. "It won't work, it's a bad idea, it's a really, _really bad idea!_ "

The egg rocked very slightly.

Terezi whirled around, staring in horror. She perceived a shift in the smells signifying the slightest shift from the egg, before it stopped rocking in place. "Oh no, please _calm down,_ you'll break or something!"

The egg stopped moving, apparently just as surprised as Terezi had been.

Terezi bowed her head. "...I'll try, okay?" She kept looking at the ground. "It probably won't work, though. I, uh. I'm sorry." Not sure exactly she was apologizing for, she squared her shoulders and stomped off through the forest.

The egg settled down. After a while, it radiated something that could only be described as a universally applicable sense of parental smugness.

* * *

Exactly where Karkat had gotten the idea to build a giant slingshot from his house for the purposes of hunting wasn't something he would ever be able to readily explain to his satisfaction.

The best he could manage was that the idea was sort of lurking out there, and his head happened to be nearly empty enough to fit itself into. _Why_ he had thought it would be a good idea to build it was another question, or where he had found a carpenter drone weak enough and dim enough to be pummeled into compliance was another one. (Eridan had provided the drone, actually; he tended to move from one hive to another as his various piratical activities demanded, and Karkat hadn't gotten around to asking him where the hell the drones were coming from. He also hadn't told him why he wanted the drone; he was worried about Eridan demanding they start acting in tag-team culling shooting games. And also _they_ were the bullets.)

Karkat did have dreams, though. In the dark spaces after waking up and his mind free to wander and find something that had been there _before_ him, floating on his blood, like a carrier signal homing in on him specifically. And in those dreams, there were _visions._ Dreams of a world that could have been, a rage echoing across the stars so that it promised to wipe them all out for something cleaner to come, and so very often, dreams of fire. And hot irons.

Slingshots were less so. A fleeting vision within a vision; Karkat still wasn't entirely sure what the phrase 'trigger warning' even meant, but he supposed it had something to do with warning neighbors away from your house on account of all the itchy trigger fingers.

Karkat hopped into the catapult seat, just big enough for a full-sized troll to sit in (he wasn't sure why he had overbuilt it), and gave the layers of ligament ropes a wary pluck. They were firm, making a nice whistling noise, a few of them widening to carry the stresses while others delivered muscular power. He frowned, noticing the slackness in a few, and he commanded, "Pull it back more! Need more power!"

Below him came a crackling hiss.

"I said _more power dammit!_ "

The hiss was more grumpy now, and the hulking crustacean lusus below snapped its claws. The multiple eyes on his broad facial shell rotated in place; Karkat was _certain_ his lusus had just rolled eyes at him.

"And I saw that!"

Another hissing sound; to the average troll it would have sounded like a death threat with many promises of spikes shoved in unsanitary places, but Karkat recognized a chiding 'you're not gonna like it' response when he heard it. "Just do it! I am going to nail so many bleed things, just you watch! _I've discovered their weakness, getting hit in the everything at a hella lot miles per hour! With horns. Big thick horns. Who's got nubby horns now!?_ "

The crab lusus rolled his eyes again, scuttling around with faint tremors from the impacts. He busied himself, adjusting a few straps here and there, relaxing the restraints, and slowly the huge towering assemblage over head pushed it's payload further and further, under enormous power.

(There was probably a rule against allowing mutant lusii to operate heavy machinery. In fact there was an actual law against it. Karkat made sure to look it up before hand just so he could take the smug pleasure of breaking it when no one was around to get him into trouble on it.)

Two massive towers, sprouting off the broadest point of his hive's various rooftops, held a variety of pneumatic machinery like biomechanical muscle clustered, pulling on a payload section with enormous power, and only a set of restraining bolts keeping it locked up and un-tossed. Karkat was sitting in it, and looking a lot like a little stone sitting in a giant slingshot.

Karkat looked through a big lens he bargained off Equius in exchange for some statue thought lost years ago until it turned up in the local filth dump (appropriate, Karkat had said, Equius had pretended he hadn't heard that). He spotted a large raptor elk and made the appropriate adjustments to the sighting gear; the giant slingshot pivoted a few degrees, aiming him the right directing and adjusting his aim height. "Fire!" he commanded.

His lusus looked at him doubtfully and carefully poked a large lever, which immediately broke off for no apparent reason.

The slingshot did not fire Karkat away so much as it suffered a controlled explosion, rattling dramatically and somehow staying intact as Karkat was propelled, rocketing ahead to his destination almost instantly. It all happened far too fast to really describe in point-by-point detail. The slingshot fired, and Karkat struck his destination.

Tragically, by that time, the raptor elk was chasing a passing chainsaw-fly and Karkat missed him by a mile. This is normally poetic license to indicate an extreme degree of poor aim or the brief suffering of such. Karkat was rarely so lucky, and he only came to a stop _exactly_ one mile away, a dust cloud of splinters, torn earth foutaining up like a very cost-effective volcano and tree debris following him.

Eventually, Karkat dared to open his eyes. Doing his best to ignore the pain in pretty much every part of his body, he cautiously started to reach for the little helmet he was wearing and worked out that his arms couldn't move. They weren't hurt, but he just could move.

Also, everything around him was quite scratchy. Karkat worked out that he had smashed halfway through a tree and gotten stuck. A bit of hurried recollection confirmed that the same thing had happened to about a mile's worth of _other_ trees, this one only punched through and broken nearly in half. "Dammit," Karkat whined.

The tree snapped the rest of the way through and fell over. " _Dammit!_ " Karkat shouted, but it was a bit muffled.

He wiggled, helplessly, in the tree. His legs wiggled ineffectually from the tree, giving the impression that not only had the tree attempted to grow feet to flee its doom, but it had first searched through a refuse bin so disreputable that even the garbage couldn't stand it. Aforesaid wiggling stopped when Karkat heard the ground shaking from a heavy tread; not particularly forceful, but simply so big that it made a powerful impact where it went.

A distinct two-legged tread. It was another troll. A _big_ troll.

Karkat's eyes widened inside the tree as he began to tremble. His first instinct was to run. That wasn't exactly an option right now. He froze perfectly still, trying to suppress his sides shaking like they were going to break, and he bit into the tree to stop any sounds he might try to make. Maybe it wasn't a troll but a drone – no, wait, that was _almost worse,_ okay, maybe it was just a neighbor, about to kill him and take his stuff. He didn't have any good stuff but they didn't have to know that, oh _damn this was a bad idea,_ who would take care of his lusus and he still had so many seasons of shows to yell at people about online, this was an absolutely _ridiculous_ way to die, stuck inside a tree and fired out of a giant slingshot, they'd put him in the history books for dying in such a ridiculous and embarrassing way-

The bigger troll paused, apparently noticing him. Karkat held his breath, trying not to shout. The world turned upside down for him, the tree creaked as the ground got further away and as a couple dozen horrible scenarios ran through Karkat's head, he had the time to notice the shoes of the other troll in the brief time he had to see. The shoes were bright red, an crude cross-section of laces and flat bug-printed extensions, and on the one hand the shoe was probably about as big as his torso but on the other hand he _knew_ those shoes.

Relief flooded into the place that absolute terror had so quickly vacated, and the resulting dissonance made him cranky. "Put me right the hell down, _dammit!_ "

His view point rotated a few times, setting about a broad and fairly pudgy mid-section. He was lifted up, past a teal symbol, and finally was made to look directly into Terezi's face. She didn't have much of an expression besides mild surprise.

She stared down at him and eventually said, very calmly, "Maybe."

"I said put me down!"

"Nah, you're probably safer in there." Terezi waved the increasingly unstable log around, scattering a few remaining leafy spines. "I mean, you can't hurt yourself, trip into any unsightly ditches, wander into the mouths of sleeping predators... it's a good deal for you, really!"

"I mean it, lemme go!"

Terezi spun around in place. "Nah! This is better for you, trust me on this!" With some difficulty, she managed to balance it on her back so that Karkat was looking over her head. "Just imagine it; you'll be my official seeing-eye lowblood! I don't need one but _they_ don't know that! Until I get a stabby thing and remove them from being a problem. You can be a lure for finding the wicked and stuff like that."

"I am not bait!" Karkat wiggled his face against the back of her head. "When was the last time you washed your hair!?"

"That's top-secret information." She grinned. "I could tell you, but then I'd have to bring you into my super-secret coterie of doomed minions! It's great, legislacerators get to have a whole inquisitorial squad with them. Pick whoever they want as long as they don't suck too bad. That _probably_ rules you out but, hey, you never know!"

"Fantastic," Karkat grumbled into her head. "Let me go. _Please._ "

"Do you mean it?"

"No! LET ME GO NOW, DAMMIT."

Terezi shrugged. "Awright." With a slight effort she got the log back in the front of her and pried the log apart, and wedged her foot in until the whole thing shattered. Karkat flopped out, a small but heavy helmet with holes for his horns rolling around at his feet. "Consider that an investment in paying back any favors I might owe you in the future."

"Fan-freaking-tastic." Karkat rolled over on the ground on his back, looking up directly at Terezi. At the rather extreme angle, she loomed over him more than she usually did. Which was saying a lot, considering she was easily twice his size. He couldn't see much of her face, but he did see a section of gray split by a huge fanged grin and red shades staring down at him. She took a stop forward, her foot hovering over him briefly until she reworked her pose and took a step back. She had been standing in a very aggressive way; not exactly _dominant_ but definitely making herself look firmly in control.

His bravado didn't often stick around for long after the head of the moment. Karkat stared up at her, the tall pointed horns angling slightly away from her head. He wavered a bit in place, doing his best not to stare and he looked away in a hurry, tugging up his sweater so no one could see the color he flushed.

He scooted around, his body positioned in a way that was genuinely receptive. Terezi hesitated and took a few steps back, her demeanor faltering a bit in that 'oh geez did I go too strong' fashion. Flushed flirtations, a delicate back and forth of aggressive flirtation and supportive reciprocation, were notoriously touchy.

Terezi scooted back, digging up little trails of dirt, and heavily sat down on the soft dirt. He looked back at her real quick – she smelled the _bright cherry_ on him, didn't say anything – and quickly looked away, flushing even hotter. Terezi started to reach out to him, hesitated, and drew her hand back like she worried he might burn to the touch.

She held her hand there, noticing Karkat turning his head to regard her hand. She froze, thinking he might recoil if she moved too fast. He hesitantly raised his own hand and brushed it against her knuckle, somewhere between a fist-bump and a touch. He was so _warm_ to the touch, hot in a way that even Tavros or Sollux hadn't been on the rare occasions she had to touch them, maybe not even _Aradia_ was this hot. Like fire under the skin, his blood practically on fire-

Terezi's knowledge of history triggered that little association as a _bad thing,_ very bad indeed, and she almost drew away. Karkat misinterpreted her change of expression for revulsion and recoiled, twisting around and slamming his hands into the dirt, and she smelled shame and mortification on him, and she flinched. _Damn it, I screwed up, AGAIN._

He was thinking the same thing. They tended to be on similar wavelengths that way.

"Sorry," he mumbled, barely moving his mouth so it was hard to understand him, and quietly too. He lowered his head, staring very intently on the dirt so he didn't have to embarrass himself worse.

Terezi forced herself to think, and think fast – _what would he actually respond to –_ and she grinned as snidely as she could. "You're..." she almost said ' _hot'_ but realized that might also be taken the wrong way. He might think she was teasing him, or feel like she was being aggressive enough to spook him. (Even the rom-coms did not treat inter-caste romances with aggressively flirty highbloods too well. Too much potential for terrible things in that.) "You're crazy-warm. Feels weird." Terezi flexed her hand. She could still feel his warmth on her skin, a pleasant contrast to her coolness.

Karkat tilted his head at her suspiciously. "Weird _how?_ " He glowered, shifting into what was, for him, a slightly more amiable mood.

"...You could get a job as a barbecue pit?" Terezi said innocently. "Just lie under the cooking pit and warm up the food?"

Karkat snorted. "When I'm done, I'll get people lining up to be _my_ barbecue pits, just you watch."

Terezi wrinkled her snout. "That doesn't make any sense."

"I know!" Karkat flopped down, glancing at her. Terezi thought about how _small_ he was. Frail looking, the bouquet of aromas off him speaking of concealed weakness and constant fears and always being on the defensive, and it elicited such _pale_ feelings in her... and then he opened his mouth and she felt pitch or flushed differently from one moment to the next.

It was weirdly exhilarating. Right now, he smelled okay. Not great, but he was feeling okay. Terezi sighed internally; crisis averted. Oh, wait, no, he was looking directly at her and, hostility fading, his mood was changing... she smelled the shift on him. "Is something wrong?" Karkat asked uncertainly. "You call before you come out here. Did your tree fall down or something!?"

"What? No!"

"Your lusus hatched and it's the end of the world! I knew it, the day you showed up just to be there would be the day everything ended-"

"No, no, my lusus is still in her egg!"

"Oh, right." Karkat straightened up. "And presumably not imaginary."

Terezi snorted. "Right, keep saying that." She patted him on the head, nearly knocking him over; she marveled at how small he was, by sheer force of personality he steered every conversation he was in and could get them to actually focus on things... and then in person, he was so small and tiny and... _breakable._ It seriously worried her. He might be culled just for being too puny-

Karkat swallowed and scooted slightly closer to her, watching her very carefully. Terezi adjusted herself to match, and by accident their hips bumped together, like a mountain and a sapling meeting at their bases. They both squeaked and almost ducked away, sheer surprise and embarrassment rooting them to the spot.

But they didn't move away. She was sitting _right next to him._ Terezi wavered briefly, forcing herself to stay determined. "I, uh. I wanted to ask you something."

Karkat radiated bemusement. "Oh. That's it?"

"It's kind of important. To, y'know. Me? Something I worry about a lot."

"Hmm. And you couldn't wait to talk online for it?"

"I wanted to see you." Terezi froze up, realizing she had mixed up, and before Karkat or her could start sputtering and making it worse, she hurried up. "Okay, um, yeah! I was watching a thing, and there was this one bit I really didn't get, and I needed to ask you about it."

"Uh huh?" Karkat smelled dubious. "What was it on."

Shoot. She hadn't thought that far ahead. "I. Um. I don't remember." Inventing fast, drawing on her vague knowledge of 'weird stuff Karkat likes', she said, "It didn't really stick in the head. I just remembered this one thing, and it's been bugging me ever since. And you know about that kind of stuff. It's a relationship... thing."

"Oh, okay." He nodded imperiously up at her. "Tell me!"

She put her fingers together, tapping her claws together and trying to piece together random plots into a mimicry of his rom-com plots enough to fool him. She chose to lie with the truth. "So there's this pair, and they're in a relationship. A highblood, super low as highbloods go but _still_ a highblood. And the other one, he's a lowblood." Technically true, she supposed. If he had _been_ on the hemospectrum at all. "He's kind of excitable and cranky but he's super soft underneath-"

"The guy sounds like a total weenie," Karkat sneered.

Terezi cackled. "Oh, _yes._ Anyhow, the highblood girl, she acts all tough and creepy to mess with people, but she's just acting tough because its the only thing she really gets. And this relationship... it's her first _real_ one, and it's gotten pretty serious for both of them. But they're both young. They're just kids. They're only six or something."

Karkat snorted. "Plenty of people our age have gotten into real committed quadrants before then. What's the issue?" Terezi fiddled with her claws. Her head dipped and she anxiously wiggled in place, nearly knocking Karkat over. "Ow!"

Without looking, she helped him up. Trying to find a place to _continue,_ she hesitantly breathed in, and out. _Don't lie. Just don't tell him what you really mean._

"They're young enough that they don't _know_ anything like this kind of thing," she said. "No first hand experience. And she's _scared._ That it's just... wiggler infatuation. That they're gonna mess each other up or break up what they already had going. And it was a super nice thing they had, and she is freaked the hell out that what they're dealing with isn't even anything _real."_ A brief hesitation. "She really wants it to be. But she just doesn't know."

There. She had said it. Let things be as they were.

She smelled Karkat turning to stare up at her, and her ears twitched at the faintest sound of him raising an eyebrow. "And this bothers you?" He asked dubiously.

"Uh." She wiggled her claws again and sighed with a cranky snort. "Yeah."

Karkat leaned back. "...This isn't _actually_ a romance plot you're not coping with, is it."

He wasn't really asking a question. Terezi could smell his certainty, even as she froze up. She stiffened, and relaxed. Why lie once you've been exposed?

Because hiding stuff felt safer than risking everything by being open. She shifted slightly. "No. Not really."

"Okay. This is one of those 'friend of a friend' kind of things. Isn't it?"

"...Yeah."

Karkat nodded, trying to look wise. (He looked like he had some indigestion.) "Then you should tell your 'friend'," and he waggled his claws in air quotes, sticking his tongue out at it. "That freaking out over stuff like this is just wasting time!"

Terezi blinked. "Huh?"

"Come on, it's obvious!" Karkat waved his arms around irritably, standing up. "If they were already friends to begin with, they probably had a pretty tight bond going on there. Romance woes are all part of growing up. They can figure it out; if it doesn't work out... okay, that might mess things a little, but come _on._ They can grow up some more. Get over it. But if they were already close, than going into the quadrants officially is just a natural progression of feelings that were already there to begin with."

"I guess so," Terezi allowed.

"Yes! But most of all, she should _talk_ about it with her friend. Put it all out in the open. Once she's comfortable with it, I mean." Karkat reflected on that. "If she's trying to think it over... actually that might be a good idea. Going from moirails straight to matesprites or whatever is the stuff of tragedies. You gotta work out that kind of stuff _hard_ or you'll end up with... mutual kills and something like that. But the point is, she shouldn't be scared of it. Just go with it, see where things are, and if a good moment to bring it up with her friend pops up, take a chance on it."

"...Yeah," Terezi said. She smiled, and it was a genuine one. "That sounds good. Thanks."

"Yeah, yeah." Karkat adopted a lofty tone. "You chose well in coming to _me._ One day soon, I shall be rightfully appointed the supreme lord and master of all things quadrant related. They shall be renamed in my honor in the ages to come, just you see."

Terezi snorted. "Uh _huh._ " She stood up, wiped off a few bits of dust from her, and she realized something. Very slowly, she turned down to Karkat – ridiculously small and frail, but so _important,_ somehow- and spoke. "Karkat?"

"Yeah?"

"You said _she_ a couple times back there. I never said that the person I was talking about actually _was_ a girl. That was just something in the bull story I fed you."

Karkat gave her a smug look. "I can read between the lines, you know. I notice stuff."

"You do, huh...?" Terezi felt the edges of panic creeping in.

"Oh, yes!" Karkat struck a pose. For some reason. "I won't tell anyone. Nepeta's secret is safe with me."

"Oh, good." Terezi's mind went blank for a minute. "Wait. _Nepeta_?!"

"Oh, yeah! I figured it out." Karkat was practically radiating smugness. "Super-strong moirallegiance gravitating to a matespriteship as they become the most powerful positive influences in their lives. Not surprising, happens all the time."

"...But, really? _Nepeta_? And Equius?" Terezi blinked. It was as good a obfuscation as anything. "Okay, then. Clearly I must improve my deceptive skills."

"I'm not sure it's the best thing for them at the moment," Karkat mused. "I mean, they both have their flush crushes. Equius has that thing for Aradia and Nepeta-" He stopped. He wiggled a bit uncomfortably. "Um. Yeah. Point is, those two might go for it, but they're a little too pale to really be happy in a passionate relationship. Pale with some flush, it'll even out."

"Uh huh."

"And on that note, the... physical issues." Karkat looked uncomfortable. "Nepeta and him will _definitely_ have to work on the problems there. Any matespriteship where there's a risk of breaking someone is a big problem. Not a deal-breaker but serious."

Karkat thought more deeply on it. Terezi shifted awkwardly; from her current stance, Karkat was as high as her thigh and about as wide. "Right. Physical issues. Like, strength discrepancies and size difference. Yeah, gotta think about those ahead of time."

"Well, obviously." Karkat looked up at her. "Uh, could you do me a favor? I think I hear my lusus screaming for me and I'm not totally sure which direction my hive is."

"That'd be easy. Just follow the broken trees! They smell like pine and shattered hip chitin. Say, how did that happen, anyway?"

"I built a giant slingshot, fired, and I missed."

Terezi gaped at him. "You built a giant... _slingshot?_ "

"...Yes."

"Why?!"

"I dunno. Because it was cool, I guess."

Terezi considered this with all her wisdom. "You're right, that sounds awesome. I want one! Oooh!" She grabbed Karkat, hoisting him atop her shoulder. "We get back to your hive, we get your lusus to set it up we it can shoot us _both_ at the same time!"

"Wait, what!? Why!?"

"Because it's awesome, duh." And with that, Terezi went charging off, to the tune of Crab-Dad's increasingly frantic shrieks.


	3. Sadness Fades With Cans

Mild spoilers for the final updates!

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck.

* * *

Terezi walked along the streets of Can Town, her massive form gently veering out of the way of the smaller carapacians like a mighty tree just barely bending out of the way of the wind. Her legs moved in the energy-saved method of the legislacerators; smooth up-swing action, roll forward, let the momentum carry your other leg, and repeat. She could walk for a very long time like that, with only a few smashed cans or flying carapacians when she timed it wrong. Nowadays, her pace tends to carry her far from the cans where everyone else has loosely shacked up, finding new cans as the urge to spread out hits them. She wants to find a further can; being around too many people is...

Distressing. She can't put words to it. Too many people, in too few hours, makes her want to crawl up into a human bed and hunker down and just lay there until things stop.

She keeps her head held up high, her back straight like the cane she carries. Her horns arch up over her head; it is important, she thinks, to walk with her head held high. It's... she almost thinks 'nice', but nice is just not her. At the very least, she doesn't look _mean,_ exactly. Just sort of grumpy. And she doesn't grin as much anymore; it's not that she doesn't have anything to smile about. She doesn't feel the need to try to spook people with her big grins and sharp teeth; messing with people's heads isn't as fun as it used to be.

It's good enough that the suffering is over. Messing with people feels a bit backwards, mostly. And still, Terezi thinks of these things and she can't help but feel unsettled. Her stomach crawls with a cold chill, and she feels adrift, lost and with no place to stand. Her face fixates towards the ground as her pace comes to a stop and she is still, her grim expression slipping away. Her eyes are downcast behind her shades, her mouth is a neutral shape almost too small to be a frown, and she gives out a heavy sigh.

The thought comes to her, as it typically does. "God," she says, and her tone is the tired, gray mumble of just not caring that much mostly. "I suck."

"Hey, what the hell, I just heard lies being spoken, I said enough of that shit already."

Terezi turns slowly, like a monolith on a spinning table or a mountain slowly moving itself around. The further reaches of Can Town are overgrown, the ground flattened into roads that need no paving, a chorus of greens and faint, peaceful colors. Karkat scuttling up the road, hunched over and almost on all fours. His back posture is _strange,_ his spine almost permanently flexed outward. It's easier for him to lope than to run, or walk.

The treacherous bits in her head make her want to run or walk away. Tell him to go somewhere else, or just ignore him. It's a struggle to overcome it, but she's always been about beating odds. She's also always been about the irrelevance of luck. His presence is not a coincidence.

"Hi, Karkat," Terezi says as he approaches and goes into a slightly more bipedal stance. Her tone is calm, steady, more powerful than the one she had spoken in before. He radiates greetings just from the smell. He radiates _a lot more_ than just happy to see her. He smells like Kanaya when she sees Rose. Like the Mayor and the awesome mail lady, walking down the street and holding hands. It's also a bit like the way Gamzee smells at times when he pokes his face out and follows Karkat for a while before disappearing again, and Vriska when she needs Terezi.

Terezi's face moves on it's own; she's always done things on spur of the moment because they feel right, and try as she might, she can't stop the grin. It's playful and it's sweet, as sweet as she can manage anyway (and she still knows she looks hella scary, which makes her feel good). Karkat just makes her smile.

And the way he shifts around, straightforward and awkward in turn; it's _nice_ to smell the effect she can have on him, and he knows the effect she has on her and she decides to stop that train of thought right there before it gets too recursively giddy.

She focuses on him, smelling him getting more and more embarassed at being right in the spotlight of her attention. She's honestly impressed that he isn't budging and relents a bit. She relaxes, trying to ignore the gray deadness in the back of her head. It's a bit easier with Karkat around; not simple, it is always there with her without the medicine, and it is something that companionship and love can't fix or do away with (and rom-coms that say they can are _goddamn stupid_ ).

But it is a little easier. She feels more okay than she normally does.

"Uh, so you, uh..." Terezi clears her throat. There are echoes. "What are you doing out here?"

"Um." Karkat practically has a _sound effect_ for when he freezes up. It's just his body straightening up and his feet digging into the ground, but he does so much of it that its a single noise. "I was... uh. House hunting!"

Terezi squinted. Somewhere in the distance a few carapacians were studying them for an almanac; she could smell their ivory and onyx. "House hunting."

"Yeah! Uh... I don't really like living in the center of Can Town. Nothing on the Mayor or anyone, oh God nothing on him _ever,_ I just..." Karkat sounded a bit edgy. "I don't _like_ being surrounded by people. Spent most of my life on plains with distance from neighbors, and sweeps on a little meteor. I'm done with being in the middle of everyone and everything in the _whole damn world okay._ "

Terezi leaned back reflectively, rolling this around in her head and imagining less people being around all the time. A time without footsteps everywhere and too many smells and not having to work out how to pretend to be doing fine sounded amazing. "Yeah," she said distantly. "Just. Um. Yeah."

Karkat relaxed slightly, his excuse was working out. "I was thinking... one of the cans out there." Terezi turned to follow the scent of where he pointed; she smelled larger cans, on the outskirts of Can Town, more isolated but close enough to town to walk from if you felt like it. "Far enough that I don't have to stick around in the middle and be away from everyone forever, but feel safe too?"

She leaned forward on her cane, tapping it thoughtfully. Slowly she smiled again. "Yeah, that does sound pretty cool. "Safe," she repeated, rolling it around in her mouth. " _Safe._ Saaay-fuh." She licked the roof of her mouth, tasting the syllables. She couldn't help but grin.

Karkat squinted at her. "You're being weird again. You stop that!"

She stuck her tongue out. "Nah!"

"DEAR GOD HOW DO YOU FIT THAT IN YOUR MOUTH."

Terezi retracted her tongue. Her jaws unhinged before she spoke again. "I dunno. Benefical mutations, I guess?" She shrugged. "You know, it's nice to think, but there's plenty of room for those here."

"Room for what?"

"Mutations. No one cares about if you stick to the template or not."

Both of them stare reflectively into empty space into their own way. It really was a brave new world.

"...Huh," they both said after a long moment.

"So, uh..." Terezi stretched, trying to look casual and cool and failing miserably. "Getting a house. Away from people except the ones you're cool with seeing every day. Is there... uh. Have you found any good ones?"

Karkat nodded. "Yeah, sure," he added to make sure Terezi got it. "Found some good ones over... uh..." He waved in a completely random direction away from town. "Over there?"

"Neat. Come show me?"

Karkat nodded. As he walked away, Terezi considered him thoughtfully.

"And you know," she adds with a little bonk of her cane on the top of his head. "If you were just keeping an eye on me, you could have said so?"

"I was not!" He lied.

Terezi cackled and gave him another bonk, gentler this time. "Holy hell how did you survive for so long being this bad at lying?"

"I don't know!"


	4. Busted Lunch, Bus Stop

Done for a prompt on tumblr: they wanted a modern AU where their first meeting is at a bus stop.

Disclaimer: I don't own Homestuck. This is a work of entertainment without monetary gain.

* * *

Terezi bit back a curse, remembered that no one else was there and let it out. In deference to it being a public area, though, she just said it under her breath.

Her cane rattled against the ground as she tapped out a furious rhythm, _almost_ loud enough to help her ignore the sound of the bus speeding away. That booming engine and those squealing tires were _taunting_ her, she just knew it.

There were harmonics in everything. Terezi was _very good_ at listening and finding the secret solutions to puzzles, the little clues in them. She was so really very good at working things out, or at least she liked to tell herself that when that faulty and brittle thing she liked to imagine was 'self-confidence' came falling apart like a stack of breadsticks in the rain. Right now, she was positive that the sounds of the bus were mocking her.

Just a few seconds faster, and she would have caught the bus.

Terezi's treacherous mind _instantly_ going to the possibility that maybe she'd been there in time and the bus driver was actually a huge asshat who had taken one look at her and went 'nope' and hit the gas before she could get close.

Terezi dropped down on the bench, heavily. There was a sharp crunching noise.

" _GODDAMIT WHAT THE HELL!?_ "

Terezi's first instinct was diverting herself away from the instant guilt reflex; _schadenfreude_ was a comfort and she focused upon someone whose tone suggested a day that was somehow even worse than hers.

Terezi centered on the voice; she heard a faintly piping, almost musical cadence behind the screeches and she considered it a sign of her skill that she could notice that at all. Or think clearly through the blistering rant going on now, blasting at her hardened ear drums like a flamethrower attacking a cliffside.

"WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, I LITERALLY ONLY PUT IT DOWN FOR HALF A MINUTE AND THE TIME IT TAKES FOR ME TO LOOK AWAY YOU GODDAMN SIT ON IT, YOU SAT ON IT, YOU ACTUALLY SAT ON IT. WHO EVEN DOES THAT!? WHAT IS SO DAMN HARD ABOUT LOOKING WHERE YOU'RE GOING, WHY WHY WHY-"

And the rest was incomprehensible. Absolutely impossible to grasp from where she was sitting, words distangling into an cacophonous shriek of pure misery and undirected fury, just shouting like the world had done its hardest to offend him.

Terezi was actually impressed. Irritated, but impressed. She wasn't sure if she should give him the address to some kind of world record pace or bop him on the head so he'd shut up already. More out of morbid curiosity to see what he might do, she said nothing and waited for him to exhaust himself yelling.

Over a minute and a half later, he was _still_ yelling.

She bobbed him on the side with her cane. "God, _shut up already._ "

"No, first of all, screw you?" the tone was simultaneously questioning and still outraged. She had never heard someone put so much meaning into a shout-storm before. "Second of all, _SCREW. YOU._ A thousand times, and then forty other times, and you goddamn do it with a _RUSTY POLEAXE._ Screw yourself sideways, nice and bloody and invite a whole bunch of freaky-ass perverts who get into that sort of thing! You make a _SHOW_ out of it, you get yourself a career freaking the hell out of every civilized things that walks and hops and crawls and does stuff that isn't pandering to your weird as hell career fetish, and I hope you are _goddamn PROUD OF YOURSELF FOR THE MESS OF YOUR LIFE._ "

"...Okay, I'll bite. What parasite crawled down your brain and won't leave? There is no way in hell any of this shouting is the result of any brain that isn't horribly diseased."

"Oh, _good,_ the bench-squasher with the smacking cane and the tie-dye jeans is accusing _me_ of having a diseased brain!" Now the shouter was walking around and around the bus stop, his paces marking up the step of a furious tantrum run.

Despite herself, Terezi was actually _enjoying_ the situation. This guy was kind of fun to wind up. A bit irritating but fun. She grinned and he _instantly_ said, "Oh God, what the hell is that. You stop that, you stop that right now. Is that smiling? That cannot be smiling, smiles don't have those freaky-ass pointy dealies in the mouth. Did you put little knives in your mouth? God, you did, didn't you? First you implant little teeth-knives in your mouth, then you destroy my lunch. This is all part of some sick, insane plan to piss me off and ruin my day, _well job well done,_ you can frickin' go on home because plan accomplished! My day is miserable forever!"

"Lunch?" Terezi wiggled around; the box crunched a bit beneath her and she felt the guy in the bus stop with her actually _flinch,_ like she'd made threatening motions at his pet. "Oh, gross. What did you even have in here? Wait, is that... what the hell is that I'm smelling? Oh, I don't know what that is but it is vile. Good Lord, what did you use to make this stuff? Is that... spaghetti and sprinkles?"

"Some of it, yeah." He bristled, like a hedgehog stuffed into a static machine. "What's wrong with that!?"

"Even if we were suddenly all immortal I don't think I'd have time to explain how wrong that all is." She made fake retching noises that were a little inspired by genuine disgust. "I mean, come on! _Spaghetti?_ Do I smell custard on it? Sweet Jesus that is somehow even worse!"

"It is not! You just don't have any taste in cuisine."

"Funny." Terezi shifted around; her pants were starting to feel gross. "I was thinking the same thing." She stood up, brushing herself off.

"You tasteless thug, you come over here right the hell now, I will _fight_ you for... genuine... cuisine... honor..." he trailed off as Terezi stood up. Because he was still talking, she got an idea for where he was standing in relation to her and how tall he actually was. He was pretty small, it seemed; he had been face to face with her when she was sitting down, she realized. "Holy crap you're tall."

Terezi's head tilted down at where his voice came from, about on level with her stomach. She tapped him on the head with her cane and shifted into a fighting position. "Still wanna fight? C'mon, let's go, I will totally boot your ass over the next district."

He grunted, made a few noises like he was doing the same (he had gumption, if nothing else), and stopped again. "Wait. Oh shit. You're blind. You are _actually blind._ "

She tapped him on the head with her cane. "So is that a yes to the fighting or..." He didn't say anything. "What? I'm serious! I have to kill time until the bus gets here and I am bored out of my skull."

His silence was almost a mortified noise.

Terezi sighed; the fun was gone. "Whatever." She dusted the remnants of spaghetti and custard off herself, her nostrils wrinkling. She felt a bit guilty about it, now that the moment was gone. "Okay, y'know what? Where's the nearest food place?"

"Uh... right across the street?" he said uncertainly. He probably glanced at the remains of his lunch because he instantly went back to angry. "You can't just smash my lunch like that and get a free pass, I don't care what's going on with you or how ridiculously huge you are, I will literally sue the food off your table, just you watch me, you goddamn owe me a lunch, _pay up dammit!_ "

"Right, okay." She started walking. "You, stick with me, I'm gonna pay back your lunch and then you can get the hell off my back about it."

"Wait. What?" He deflated. "You're actually paying me back? Seriously?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever. Shut the hell up already."

"Huh. Okay... then?" Now completely bamboozled and bewildered, he followed along at a loss of what else to do.

He was _funny._ Terezi was tempted to do something ridiculous, and did it anyway. "Hey. You free tonight?"

" _What._ "

Terezi snickered as they crossed the street. "You doing anything tonight?"

"Uh. No?"

"Alright; wanna go do dinner or something?"

He blinked. "Are you seriously asking me out?"

"Sure, why not? I'm bored."

He grunted in response.

"So, was that a yes, or...?

He threw his arms up. "That was a _yes,_ God, okay, fine?"

* * *

"And _that,_ " Karkat Vantas said, five years later. "Is the true and completely unvarnished story of how me and Terezi first met, thank you very much."

Kanaya Maryam, overseeing the wedding details and devising appropriate outfits for the Pyrope bridesmaids and whoever Karkat decided to bring for best man, sipped her tea. "Strange. Terezi always tells that story with more exploding buses and rescuing you from spy thriller movie villains."

"And then!" Terezi said dramatically somewhere else. "Karkat exploded! Some of the pieces landed on cloning equipment and grew into new individual Karkats, and _that's_ how he's always on the phone yelling at you for doing dumb stuff."

"Always figured," Dave said sagely. "Next time you tell this story, make me the spy thriller bad guy. It'll be awesome."


	5. The Mayor Used Sad Look Super Effective

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck. This is a work of entertainment with no monetary gain.

* * *

Terezi crossed her arms, clanging them together with all the authority she had mastered over sweeps of playing roleplaying scenarios such that had invested her with the knowing of decisive badassery.

"No," she said sternly, her hair standing on end. It was like a bagful of quills had been stuck through a static ball and then laminated. "Absolutely _not_."

Karkat glanced up at her, fancied up in a teal suit and his shoulder-mane prickling against the back. He silently mouthed a few possible additions to her statement, for they were of one mind on this matter, and studied her stance. He crossed his arms in the exact same way as Terezi, doing his best to stand up from his habitual stoop and scowl in a totally badass way. (He looked like he just had some back pain and was trying to pretend otherwise.) "No," he said. "No, just no!"

John and Dave somehow sighed _perfectly_ on command and as a duo. "You only have to do it for five minutes," John said. "Just five minutes! Until the song ends, at least."

"No," Karkat said again.

Dave sidled in. "Dude, we're not trying to get you to stick your head into a monster's mouth or anything." Considering the dangers of post-SBURB neo-earth, he admended this to " _Again_."

"No!"

"You guys are making a big deal out of nothing," John complained. Between him and Dave was the Mayor and the Peregrine Mendicant. They were both looking mysterious and harder to read than usual; the Mayor expectant, the Mendicant plotting something devious. "Come on. Kanaya worked hard on those outfits!"

"The prosecution and associate were not consulted prior to the battle!" Terezi declared hotly.

She was wearing a dress, and she didn't seem happy about it. Not because it was a dress; she'd never given much indication that she disliked the idea or approved of it. Probably she didn't care what she wore as long as it fit and wasn't actively trying to eat her brains out (a problem with unethical fabric makers on Alternia, especially when catering to high-bloods; it had been said that they were mostly midbloods who didn't mind the opportunity to revenge themselves on the colder bloods), and she _did_ like the dress itself; the bright cherry red pleasing to her snout. The many frills and fabric loops, like ropes and handholds strung over a hillside, she didn't seem to like so much. It made her rustle a lot when she moved and making a lot of noise made her _really_ nervous.

Probably the only reason she wasn't already about to snap was Karkat's presence. He was doing good at calming her down without actually doing anything or being aware of it. He didn't seem to mind his suit at all - he adjusted pretty well to it and seemed to have the makings of a peacock mentality - but thrust into a group, even a small group, was hitting all his social anxiety buttons. He kept circling behind Terezi, ready to run at the first sign of an opening.

Around them, the sound of pleasant music and half a dozen couples (mostly carapacians, with a few of the quadrant-settled people from their own group) went about in the big can the Mayor had appointed at the civic town hall. Exactly how they set up a dance party and get-together so suddenly was a very good question.

Terezi had spied the choice-branches from him and all that might result. It was spooking her; _the Mayor had shipping on the brain._ All should be in terror from this dire time.

She and Karkat kept moving around, trying to escape from friends keen to see them at least enjoy themselves in public without retreating to their cans and snarling at anything that got too close, as usual. This was a tricky time; it was too easy to retreat into yourself and start falling under your own, grim influences.

Roxy, fresh from a bout with Calliope while waiting for John to join them in the obligatory 'how are those flexes even possible' limbo competition they always had at dances for no apparent reason, wandered over as Karkat and Terezi retreated further into the shadows. Dave pursued like a cryptozoologist chasing down sasquatches. John sighed dramatically and Roxy stooped a bit to place a hand on his shoulder. "Grouchy trolls giving trouble?"

"Just one freaking dance!" John declared, throwing his arms up and rattling the decorations with a burst of wind. " _Just. One. Dance._ That's all we're asking! They're acting like, like..." He paused, horrified. "Wait, no! Are they having the same problem Jake has with crowds? Did I basically just drag people with Jake's social issues into a crowded ball room!?"

"Um." Roxy considered it. "No, I don't think so. They're just grumpy and don't like being awkward. I know short grouchy troll-" She indicated Karkat. "He doesn't like that. Big grouchy troll-" She indicated Terezi, turning herself away in dire contempt from Dave's cajoling. "I'm honestly not sure? She seems like the kinda person who does awkward stuff and doesn't care."

"Maybe she's just worried about stepping on Karkat's leg or something," John said vaguely. "...Actually, that's a legitimate worry. Do we have a chaperone keeping things from letting that happening?" Roxy pointed. Hovering in the crowd was Jack Noir, hissing loudly and smacking people around with a street sign clamped between his teeth, at complete random and no apparent reasoning. Mendicant blew a whistle and charged after him with a small rubber mallet. The squeaky noises of her instructing him upon the proper duties of his job resulted. The lot of them watched for the entertainment value.

Dave came over. "Guys, I got bad news. They escaped."

John clapped his hands over his eyes. "Oh no, _oh noooo._ What are we gonna tell Kanaya? She wanted _video evidence_ of them dancing to prove her theories about their mutual colors mixing in fabric form! She made their clothes extra poofy just for that!"

"Another question," Roxy said. "Where's the Mayor?"

As that was happening, Terezi and Karkat scrambled onto the roof of the civic hall can. Somehow. "FREEDOM!" Karkat howled, hauling himself up Terezi's back to sit atop the back of her head and make a lookout.

Terezi sat on all fours, her dress accommodating that kind of stance, and she sniffed the air warily. "Don't you spoil it!" She said warningly. "We watch half a dozen movies every day, a line like this just asking for trouble!"

Karkat went 'pfft'. "Smaller Lalonde already disproved that narrative conventions have no meaning or impact upon our lives. I have resigned myself to this lesser tragedy."

"Just stop wiggling so much. Your weight on my shoulder is throwing me off."

"Uh." Karkat tightened his grip on her horns. "I'm not _on_ your shoulder."

Terezi's snout followed a new scent, tilting it slightly downwards.

The Mayor sat upon Terezi's shoulder, arms folded.

"Told you," Terezi said, over her rising dismay.

"Welp, I can put that down in the notes," Karkat said, pulling out a notebook he was keeping all his lists of 'Ways Rose Lalonde Is Wrong Forever'. Why he had brought it, that was a new question.

The Mayor stared at them. Somehow, in his way, despite being pretty much unintelligible to everyone, he made his wishes clear.

"No!" Both Terezi and Karkat said. "We are _not dancing!_ Dancing is for, for, meat-skins and short things!"

Karkat reflected. "Short _er_ things, I mean."

The Mayor's mandibles chittered impatiently, setting into a frown. He stared at them harder. He made himself known again, more ferociously this time.

Terezi and Karkat squirmed under the weight of that mighty stare. "But I don't _wanna,"_ Terezi and Karkat said, at the exact same time and with the exact same tone. They couldn't have done it better if they'd practiced.

The Mayor frowned, and started to look sad. His body plates shifted position.

"Ah, no, _no!"_ Karkat pleaded. "No, don't look like that, you stop that! _Stop looking so sad, dammit!"_

Terezi clutched the front of her dress. "I feel horrible inside," she whimpered. "This is not a right feeling, please make it stop?"

The Mayor continued to look sad; an abyssal dismay, an avatar of all that was precious and pure wounded by grief. It was all their fault and only one thing would end the misery.

Terezi and Karkat wiggled and squirmed. They looked at each other, driven to the brink, and conferred briefly. "Fine!" They said. The Mayor perked up. "Fine, we'll _dance,_ okay!?"

The Mayor clapped, full of joy, enthusiasm and other pleasant things. (He might have also been smug about his powers of upsetting people into compliance. Maybe. Hard to tell with him.) He somehow dragged both of them, despite the trolls being considerably larger than him and dragged them to the dance floor.

* * *

Eventually, they cleared up the fires.

They managed to clean away the graffiti that had mysteriously formed.

They, eventually, managed to move the town hall can back to where it was supposed to be.

And they never really did find out just _how_ Terezi and Karkat had rigged the sound speakers to be a small-scale rocket capable of forcing the surrounding area to hit escape velocity. OR how they did this by simply dancing very angrily.

But, they later admitted over the sounds of the rioting mob, at least they _did_ end up having fun.


	6. Locked In A Grocery

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck; I make no profit from this work of fiction.

Davekarezi prompt from overcurrents on tumblr: " I used to dream that one day I'd get locked in a grocery store"!

* * *

Dave stared bravely at the doors, firmly locked in place. The night outside seemed to taunt him, the two cars outside a reminder that they were locked down good. He gazed longingly at those cares: a small little box-on-wheels for him (very solid engineering, it could probably jump a skyscraper on the side but artificially worn to look like a complete junker), an enormous highblood-sized juggernaut next to it. IT was a battering ram with wheels, a towering hulk of plated armor and spiked plows. Not even tires, _treads._ It was so awesome that it actually looped back and seemed a bit goofy, just so badass that it was trying too hard.

That was probably Karkat's influence. Terezi's influence on the two-person truck was almost certainly the horrifyingly garish paint job. Dave admired it, really; you had to work hard to make something as monstrously ugly as that paint job. He was pretty sure he had seen overflying bats explode near it, refusing to live any longer in a world where such an ugly truck was allowed to exist.

With a small kick, Dave did his best to open the door; his foot met the glass with a light scuff. It rattled very slightly.

Dave raised his arms up, beseeching the gods above and possibly laughing at him. "Okay, I tried. I did my best, I did all that I could and tried until I couldn't try no more. I am totally out of it, my gumption meter has been maxed out for at least two lifetimes. Two and a half, probably..."

He went on like this for a bit. Terezi, squatting in front of a counter and trying to figure out how to get all the conflicting smells out of her nose long enough for her to come up with a plan without being distracted, sneered at him. "Oh, come on! You didn't even try at all!"

"Did too." Dave kicked the door again, light as a feather. "Found some more gumption, woulda thunk it? I should get medals, be frickin' showered and applause and accolades. The dude who did the thing when there was nothing left to do it with. They'll pile the honors on my grave. I am going to have the sickest grave ever, you'll be all sad and envious of my slammin' grave."

"What's a grave!" Karkat screamed from somewhere down the food aisles, where the candle he'd found shed some light alongside some occasional munching noises. There had been more candles, but Dave figured Karkat was eating them before Terezi could. (Dave had tried some. They were terrible.)

"A big rock thing they carve your name on, the numerical span of your wasted years, and sometimes a little phrase to make you sound like less of a waste!" Terezi said.

"What! They don't even harvest your body properly and serve it at the death-party in honor of your coolness!? Humans are so wasteful!"

Dave peered suspiciously at Terezi. "When I die and you must devour my corpse, don't let Karkat get first pickings. You have to promise me you'll remove my hair, make it into a wig, and do really good impressions of me for _years_ to come! Keep the memory of me alive, Pyrope, don't let the Strider brand die out."

Terezi rolled her eyes. "Dave, you're not gonna die. We're in a _grocery_ store. There's food and stuff. We got the money to pay off whatever we eat until morning. They'll open up in like six hours or something. Calm down."

"Can't calm down," Dave said seriously, crossing his arms and squatting down to. He gazed levelly at Terezi's eyes, like an rat staring down a dinosaur. (Also the dinosaur didn't have functioning eyes. The metaphor required work.) "We are on the verge of being totally lost. We are on a desert island, lacking even phones and Internet."

"It's just a few dead batteries, they can be _charged._ Look, I see some outlets over there."

"No! Don't charge them! Terezi. ' _Rezi. Rezi, listen to me._ We are embarking on a journey. we are on a QUEST. We follow in the footsteps of those who came before, totally macking on the mystique of lands beyond their own. We are on the edge, the EDGE, of going full blown pig worshipping weirdness. Don't let Karkat's glasses get used for starting fires, he can't handle it!"

Terezi was starting to look deeply worried. "Dave, did you lick the gasoline cap? I know it's tempting, I know how shiny and sparkly it looks but it's not a good idea. Don't lick the gas! Anyway, Karkat doesn't have glasses."

"He could get some, I guess? But don't let him lose them to the savagery, he won't last until even the last chapter. Rule of thumb, the cuddly squishy guy is always the one who gets killed to make you feel sad."

Terezi nodded sagely. "Well, he _is_ super cuddly and very squishy. Like a scalemate fattened up on hot air and fluff. If I hadn't spent my childhood hanging around his place and hunting down malicious loyalists trying to sell him out, our dear Vantas may never have even shouted his first bundle of obscenity!"

"YES I WOULD HAVE!" Karkat yelled. There was some more eating. "OH MY GOD, THESE CAKES ARE AMAZING. YOU GUYS WANT SOME!?"

"Sure," Dave said.

Terezi shrugged. "Eh, why not."

Karkat did... whatever it was he was doing over there. Dave looked at Terezi and said, in a low voice, "Gotta consider provisions too. Long term rationing. Only way to survive without turning on each other. We could swap our legs to stretch things out."

" _Dave, we are not gonna eat each other's legs."_

"We could keep the bones," Dave pressed. "Use them as swords in duels and stuff. Dipped in metal, they'd last a while."

Terezi paused, her normal instincts of common sense repressed by a good bout of ghoulishness. "...Maybe we could get matching prosthetics?"

"Sweet," Dave said. Terezi extended a massive fist big enough to match Dave's whole torso. Dave extended his hand and gently fist-bumped one of Terezi's scarred knuckles.

"ARE YOU GUYS DISCUSSING MUTILATION-BASED COOPERATION STUFF AGAIN!?" Karkat said. "I TOLD YOU, STOP DOING THAT! IT'S CREEPY AND SCARES THE NEIGHBORS!"

"What's wrong with that?" Terezi called back. "It's completely _hilarious!"_

"STOP THAT, TEREZI! BACK ME UP HERE! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE SENSIBLE ONE!"

"But being sensible all the time is so _boring!"_

Karkat uttered a strangled noise, almost exactly like a goose being choked by a snake with hiccups. (Terezi had actually witnessed that exact situation happen. It had all been the result of an attempted assassination that got weird real fast. Even before the explosive bowel-weasels had struck.) "You are NOT helping!"

He scuffled around with something there. Terezi turned to Dave for support and noticed that he was gathering things into a kind of... fort, she supposed. Piling up little backpacks around himself.

Now Karkat came over, carrying food. Terezi's curiosity got the better of her when she smelled Karkat gingerly placing it next to Dave. "Okay. What the heck are you two doing?"

"Preparing for our family unit, duh," Dave said.

Karkat nodded seriously. "Soon, I shall be ready to recieve your wiggler-seeds, the both of you."

Dave spat out a drink. "Wait, WHAT."

Karkat continued. "And then we shall raise the children in the manner we have lived. So basically like a bunch of incompetent spit-balling nitfits who couldn't get out of a wet paperbag. Oh well, we turned out okay, right?" He said this last bit beseechingly.

Terezi considered this. "Uh. We _are_ locked in a grocery store."

Karkat bowed his head miserably. "Yeah, I know..."

"I'm still hung up on the inter-breeding dealie Karkat threw out here," Dave said. "What was this about the young 'uns?"

Karkat's eyes sparkled. "It would have been so beautiful! Little horrible abominations in the face of... of... I dunno, whatever quasi-religious weirdness gets thrown in my face this week. Whatever. But they would have been _weird_ as hell and horrifying to look at, your genes combining with mine to make beautiful freakshows."

Terezi wiped away a single tear. "Oh man, don't go on about it, Kar, I'm going to get _emotional here?"_ She sniffled into her hands. "I don't know if that was even physically possible but now I want to spit in the face of biology!"

The two trolls weeped. "You guys," Dave observed, "Need to chill out."

There was a clicking noise. Terezi and Karkat kept being mopey as the door opened up and John came in. "Hey, I got a notification from your phones!" He said. "I think your battery died."

" _Oh thank God, now we don't have to eat each other and spawn horrible monsters!"_ Dave said. He frowned. "Shame. Now that I think about it, my Karkat-bred gutspawn would have been hellaciously horrible. Like squirming square-busting sleds of grossness."

"Uh uh," John said, not really listening. He looked at Terezi and Karkat. "Why are they crying?"

"They're just morning the monster babies they won't be able to have because they're not locked up in a grocery store."

John Egbert was nothing if not uniquely well-suited to deal with his strange friends. "Oh, okay. They do know you don't need to be in a store for babies, right? Or however trolls work, probably"

"Maybe they were planning on mutating me into a mother grub or something. Heck if I know."

The two of them waited. Karkat and Terezi remained stubbornly oblivious. "Maybe I should poke them with a stick until they focus," Dave said.

"Get the ones from Aise 14-E," John said. They make a buzzing noise!"


	7. The Quiet Place Grove

For Karezi Week, the prompt was Beach Episode!

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck. This story is purely a work of entertainment without monetary gain.

* * *

The sand of the beach near Can Town, in something of a geographic accident, was pretty soft and nice to stand on. Terezi wondered what sort of stone it was made from, or if that even applied to a place made at a point when it just _was,_ with no time for sand to be anything but ready-made. Over the sounds of the beach party of all their friends spread around the beach, with some attention towards a private grove some distance away from the busyness, Terezi walked up from the sea, a soaked wrap flapping in tune with her steps around her waist. Her toe claws were significantly broader than other trolls, rather like a snap-beast or a human alligator, leaving little holes in the sand where she walked. And she was pacing around, feeling the sand beneath her, smelling the salt on the air. The wind blowing hot on her shoulders (bare, exposed, _vulnerable_ but a curiously freeing thing; something for a world where you weren't permanently on the defensive and not always running to another fight), the smell of her friends and the taste of Karkat next to her, all their minds coiling up around her.

She really was having trouble adjusting; she'd spent a long time on a meteor with no real difference in environments, and then suddenly this place. The beach as a place she could go without intruding on a potentially hostile indigo-blood or seadweller was novel. And she _liked_ this part of the beach.

People were having fun around her. Some of the more physically inclined of them were having some sort of contest with a volleyball; she wasn't sure what, because while she had smelled plenty of human movies in action, this wasn't _quite_ a typical volleyball contest. Usually the nets weren't on fire. And the ball didn't have rockets on it, and she was _almost_ completely sure that hoverboards weren't involved.

As she observed, John went flying through the air, catching a rocketball hurled with impressive force. His body caught it, and he went bounced several dozen feet and drifting weightlessly. Terezi's acute sense of smell tracked him drifting up and down. She was strangely impressed; it took a lot of guts to look that ridiculous in front of people and not mind. In front of Dave and Roxy, no less.

"Absurd, isn't it?" Karkat commented next to Terezi, the much smaller troll sitting waist-deep in the water, waves gently lapping around him. "Look at all that dignity just wavering and dying."

"At this point," Terezi said. "Do _any_ of us have any dignity left?"

"Well I subject myself to everyone's attentions on a daily basis so, probably not. Just look at me, sitting here on this sand-plate and letting the water take me. I have surrendered myself to the mysterious and spiteful party gods, cynical and steadfast in their dissolution of personal dignity. Just _look_ at their feast, dammit! Look and tremble, and probably decide to never leave your house again because _come on,_ leaving my can led to this complete nonsense so what good does going into the outside world do you!? There's a moral lesson in that, probably?"

Karkat covered himself up as Terezi looked at him more fully, conscious of his beach shorts and frail build. Terezi awkwardly shifted away and loudly quietly said."You haven't actually gone to the beach before, have you?"

"Yes I have," Karkat squeaked. "All the times I've been here, it would absolutely _shame_ you with my completely absurd dedication to wasting as much of my time as possible. I am a shame to trollkind, being around here so much-"

He went on like this for a while. Terezi laughed but in deference to Karkat's bruise-tender feelings, did it under her breath, and in a particular volley of syllables he couldn't have heard her over. It was weirdly comfortable in a way; it was a little relaxing being reassured she wasn't the only one pretending to be tougher or more assured than she actually was. Everyone else felt as weak and lost as she did.

Karkat did it in a completely different way from her. She pretended there wasn't anything wrong, he puffed up and screamed until he was half-convinced himself. She wondered if he ever did it because he didn't feel like he'd ever be good enough to live up to it.

Probably, she conceded. Everyone she knew was like that. Except maybe the Mayor, she conceded, feeling his vibrant scents (a bit like plastic but with the tensions of flesh, touched by the greens he regularly gorged himself on). She followed the scent, smelled him sitting halfway across the beach where sand castle building was happening. Where Dirk was using a gigantic earthmoving monstrosity to sculpt an actual castle made of sand, the Mayor sat with the mail lady quite peacefully, shaping up a crude pyramid of sand. They scooped out windows and did they best not to make it fall apart. Dirk considerately move around them, not destroying their castle.

She sniffed around again; Karkat was calming down, lurking next to her and visibly calming down. Without really thinking about it, she reached out and firmly took hold of his shoulder. His body felt so frail under her grip; intellectually she was aware of how small he was, that his mutation _compressed_ his stature and wrapped him up in a much smaller and denser package than any troll would normally grow to. And she was gigantic, larger by far than any troll in their group except possibly a Peixes.

He felt so _easy_ to break. So horribly easily wounded, like his bones were eggshells and his skin paper, his muscles fraying wires. Her hand wavered as she thought of his delicacy, the dense but slender curve of his shoulder underneath her palm. Her grip, encompassing his entire shoulder, softened, claws scraping delicately enough on him to push shreds of bark on the air. Slowly, she brought him down, arm barely flexing as his knees bent and his backside met the ground. His descent was so gentle, the sand barely moved.

An impulse came: pull him closer. Fell how warm he really was, so low on the hemospectrum he'd _transcended_ it somehow. Heat that soothed instead of burned, like fire tamed and away from thoughts of hot irons.

Terezi swallowed, steeling herself against it. The moment passed.

Karkat, surprisingly enough, didn't say anything. He did scoot a bit closer to her, consciously or not. The nervousness radiating off him ebbed. She'd felt enough of that herself to be glad for it.

The two of them sat together for a while, not doing anything and just sitting. Karkat sighed, stretching until his back flexed into a relaxed shape and he flopped back, spread-eagled on the ground. Terezi adjusted her stance, feeling something a bit off but not totally clear what; something was sliding around and it was bugging her.

Karkat glanced up with one eye open, narrowing in on her like a scorchpod zeroing in on sunlight. "Something wrong?"

"No, nothing, nothing." Terezi fidgeted.

"Is too."

"Is not!"

"Hmph." Karkat wiggled in the sand, like he'd seen John doing earlier (though he hadn't seen the point of it), a vaguely troll-shaped impression in the sand. He rolled up to inspect his handiwork. "How's it look? Uh. Smell?"

Terezi leered. "Nice save." She sniffed it, feeling out the shape of it. "What the heck is it?"

"I have no idea," Karkat admitted. "Egbert called it an angel, I think? And he went on for a while about snow being a thing with it? I stopped paying attention after he brought in commercialization. Hell if I know why? _God_ but my friends are weird."

By Karkat standards, this was a very curt statement. Terezi was mildly impressed; Karkat had learned conciseness. Maybe some universal reminder of the Signless was, somewhere, proud. Something else Karkat had said got to him and felt bewildering. "Angel? What, like those things in Eridan's land?"

"I hope not. I get the impression humans have them as religious things."

Terezi blinked. "Humans have angels as spiritual icons? The apocalyptic harbingers of destruction and annihilation?"

Karkat nodded, grudgingly impressed. "And they're just _messengers."_

"Huh. Maybe humans are more hardcore than we thought."

"Meh. Knowing the poor, smelly mammalian horrorshows we inflicted upon Paradox Space they do some thing completely pointless and weenie-ish with them, like make them infantile wrigglers or something," Karkat said pessimistically (and technically accurate, but only if you considered anything but the source material to have particular relevance). "They suck like that."

"Well, one of them is misusing his godly powers of Breath to keep a ball out of reach," Terezi said, pointing at John hovering just far enough over Roxy and Calliope that they had to jump to reach him, in vain. At least until Jade got bored and teleported herself directly above him, sending them both crashing to the ground. "So... yeah, he's not helping their case."

Karkat palmed his face. "What did we _unleash?_ They couldn't even be slightly badass, _nooo,_ they had to completely suck in every way!" Terezi idly started drawing on Karkat's sand angel. "The hell are you doing? You're defacing my horrendous mimicry of a cultural icon I barely understand and have absolutely no interest in comprehending any further!"

"I'm making it more badass." Terezi added in a few tendrils, dragging her claw in the sand. "Some horrorterror touches here..." A couple horns, nubby, but making them triangular and long. "Some decent skull stabbers." Some teeth in roughly the right area. And then she stopped trying to think and just added weird random stuff everywhere she felt like it.

Karkat watched her draw and, when she seemed done or at least bored with it, inspected it carefully. Eventually he said, "Why's it got horns like a mix of mine and yours?"

"I dunno," Terezi lied. "'Cause, uh. I wanted to just use mine because those are _clearly_ the best but yours made it just toned done enough not to make all the other hypothetical sand monsters jealous?"

"Oh, ha-ha." Karkat followed the drawing more. "I like the wings."

"What wings?"

"On the back, over the arms."

"Those are supposed to be pinchy lobster claws!"

"Oh. Um..." Karkat thought fast. "Claws that snap so hard they propel it into the air?"

"Hrm," Terezi folded her arms. "That's acceptable, I guess." She glanced at her waist-wrap, tugging at it.

Karkat noticed. "Is something wrong with your outfit?" he asked.

"Yeah, something's been bugging me for a while. Can you see what it is?"

The tips of Karkat's horns were the highest point on him, and they were somewhere between her legs and waist, nudging a bit against her body where Karkat fussed over her. "Dammit, Pyrope! You didn't use the right kind of knot, this wrap is coming undone!"

"It is?" Terezi twisted around and felt at the sash. "Oh, that? It's just a dumb waist cloth thingy, it's not that important."

"It _brings your whole look together,_ of course it's important!" He didn't even need to bend down to tug it a bit tighter so it wasn't sliding off her swimsuit, it was probably higher than he was but Karkat was all about the look of the thing. It didn't seem to bother him; _all_ trolls were a lot larger than him and Terezi's sheer size was just a magnitude more than the others.

His fingers worked with surprising delicacy, easily undoing the inexpert knot and looping the cloth and looping it around Terezi's waist again. It _might_ have been an accident, the way his claws scraped gently against her side. His claws were blunt, just as round and harmless as his horns, but they were dense. Even though she was several times larger than Karkat was, Terezi still felt his claws sliding against her. A surprisingly intimate, close little gesture that she wiggled against. "Don't move, seriously, try to be at least slightly mature about this," Karkat said absently. Terezi internally writhed.

He was so _warm._ Karkat almost burned to the touch, and he prickled a bit when he touched her. Halting little movements, awkward and painfully reluctant to do anything, and jumping when he thought he touched somewhere out of bounds, which was pretty much anything that wasn't cloth. Warm shivers went up her side where he was, the coolness of her skin making a lovely mixing point between their extremes that put a shiver in her and _oh no she literally had no idea how to handle this kind of thing._

Terezi coped with it, in her fashion, by pretending it wasn't a problem. "I smell indecision and nerdness on full show here," she said blandly, doing her best to hide what was actually going through her mind which was mainly ' _wow I am good at pretending'_.

Karkat bristled, indignation nicely burying the whole being flustered thing. "You do not! Those aren't thing you even can smell!" He considered. "Okay, indecision, maybe. It might have pheromone traces and things. Shit, I don't know how that works. But nerdness does not have a smell!"

"Does too." Terezi poked him. "You're coated in it."

"Hmph." Karkat tightened the cloth – a bit more than strictly necessary. He looped it in a firm knot, not too much, and gave it a tug to make sure it wouldn't come loose. "There, once again I have handled a basic function of life you're perfectly capable of doing yourself."

"Am not," Terezi said loftily.

Karkat's snout wrinkled like a cardboard pipe in a laundry wash. "What does that even mean?"

Terezi sat up. "I got you to handle it for me," she said simply. Karkat blinked. "Gotten used to that kind of thing. Y'know. Getting helped." She toyed with the sand. "You know. Adjusting to not being totally on your own all the time."

Karkat looked uncertainly at her. "Is this a not-having-a-lusus thing?"

"I _did_ have a lusus! We've been over this!" The use of the past tense bothered her. "...Never mind."

She didn't expect Karkat to say anything; maybe leave. She wouldn't have blamed him. Instead he sidled up awkwardly to her, mumbled and twisted around, like a faulty engine revving up, and finally managed to mumble "Sorry".

She aimed her face down at him, eyes wide and snout working feverishly. "It's okay," she blurted out, immediately cursing herself for coming up with something so pathetic. Without thinking about it, she scooted slightly closer to him.

Karkat wiggled but didn't move away or find it unwelcome. She puffed out a relieved breath.

Thinking hard, something she'd been considering for a while occurred to her. "Hey," She said, standing up and taking hold of Karkat's wrist, pulling him up with her. He dangled several feet above the ground before she remembered to drop him, still holding delicately to his wrist. "C'mere a minute. I want to show you something."

She let go, but her hand was still offered. Karkat hesitated only for a moment – not afraid, thinking fast and certainly a bit nervous – and took it. Her hand was too big for him to hold, he placed his hands against hers, palm to palm, grasped at the inner side of her hand, and let her squeeze.

Terezi's grip was not particularly soft. It was strong, gnarled, claws almost scraping against his skin, leaving faint marks where she couldn't avoid nicking him. Her skin was cool, and he thought his blood-pusher skipped a few beats when he realized _how_ cool she was. Like deep water.

She moved easily, half-carrying him across the beach. Away from the rest of the party, following an inward curve of dense foliage growing from the cliffside as it met the beach. Trees growing high, a bit like the forest Terezi had grown up in – of course, Karkat realized with a faint pang, she was probably thinking of that _right now_ \- high enough that this part of the beach was visible from Can Town if you knew the right place to look.

The plants were dense, even prickly looking, but Terezi knew the way she meant to go. She stepped in, carrying Karkat over the tricky bits, and together they moved inwards, following a beaten trail of fallen plants stomped down, a few large stones carefully placed so that you could walk on them. Karkat would have had to hop across them normally; they were placed as stepping stones, but only if your legs were as long as Terezi's were.

They walked deeper into it; some trick of the mountains made this place far larger than it should have been. Karkat couldn't see the outside at all, barely even the sky. Even the sunlight, much like Earth's gentle star, was dimmed here. You could pretend that you were on a drifting place free from anything terrible here. Even sounds outside were muffled.

Eventually the trees didn't grow so densely together, and suddenly were outlining a clearing of blue grass. Karkat and Terezi stepped onto it, finding it softer than the sand they had been sitting on. Again, Terezi sat down, and Karkat followed suit.

Lights glimmered in the trees around them; maybe biological lanterns growing from the trees, or cleverly disguised little lights Terezi had strung up. Terezi didn't _need_ light, though; Karkat wondered what the point of putting up lights would have been.

She wouldn't have gotten anything out of it. She invited him closer at the center of the clearing.

Karkat watching little things, frail and flapping and gentle, moving with an innocent indifference to their presence. Apart from that, here the world was silent and still. The light pleasantly dim, and all sounds muffled but for the sound of Terezi stretching out and putting her hands on her knees.

She looked at him, smiling faintly.

Karkat huddled, hugging his knees and wiggling slightly against the soft grass. "It looks..." he shook his head. "It looks like your forest, doesn't it?"

"I guess so," Terezi said. "Smells the same. It... uh." She hugged her knees too. "It reminds me of home. Before things got complicated."

"Oh," Karkat said softly.

Terezi tilted her head up, hair prickling against her bare shoulders. Her expression was calm, serene. "I come here when it's... uh," she waved a hand around like she was trying to vacuum in the right word. " _Hard._ When I'm stressed out or just don't want to be around anyone for a while."

"It's pretty," Karkat said, cursing himself for not being able to find anything better to say.

Terezi chuckled. "That's one reason to come here, I guess." She wiggled in place, like she wanted to move closer to him but didn't think herself brave enough to try it. "Um. Look. It's stupid. But I wanted to say something."

"I get my share of stupid all day in and day out. I got an immunity or whatever .What is it?"

Terezi hugged her knees tighter. "I guess... I wanted to share this place with someone." She groaned and rested her face into her knees. "Oh _God_ this is literally the cheesiest thing ever. Don't you ever tell anyone about this or I will never hear the end of it."

"No, it's-" Karkat hesitated. 'Sweet' was _not_ a word that fit with anything Terezi ever did. "Cool? Best word that comes to mind."

"Hmm. Good enough, I guess." Terezi tilted her head up again, expression stoic as she thought something over. "Look. I don't really know how you handle things... not really my business saying anything like this, but if you want to hang out around here when you're overloaded or something..." she grunted. "Just... don't set it on fire or anything."

Karkat was compelled to make a tasteless joke but restrained himself. "Fair enough."

They sat together, just barely within touching distance. The closeness wasn't a big deal; they didn't _have_ to say anything about it, even if it was constantly on both their minds. A kind of unspoken arrangement hovered between them, something comfortable and calm.

After the lives they'd led, comfortable was just fine.

"Hey." Terezi shifted, scooted close enough to Karkat that her side rested into the whole of his body. "If this isn't cool, just say so. Alright?"

"Huh?"

From the other side, her arm came around him, gently moving around and cradling him in a loose hold. Terezi leaned enough that she wasn't putting any pressure on him, but could feel him. The cool of her radiated around him, and for a moment his thoughts stopped. Just a pleasant, calm experience.

Hesitantly, Karkat leaned into her, putting his arm around her's. "It's cool," he managed to say.

Terezi chuckled. "Knew it." She titled her face away so Karkat couldn't see her smile like a total _nerd._

She felt some satisfaction at working out a way to express affection after all.


	8. Even If The Mayor Doesn't Get It

Written for Karezi Week in July of 2016; this day's theme was 'Birthday'!

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck; this story is purely a work of entertainment with no monetary gain.

* * *

Terezi worked her jaws before she actually spoke, slowly and patiently flexing her abnormally flexible mandible-masticaters like she was chewing on every word before seeing fit to speak them, tasting their flavor and the ripples they might send out into the world, how people might react to them and if it was a good idea or not to say them.

The carapacians had apparently decided that Terezi was _capricious._ Impulsive, acting on every little odd thought that wandered into her think-pan and giving those weird little ideas a decent kick to see where they landed. Karkat would probably be the first to admit that this was _technically_ true and you should always carry a riot shield around Terezi in case something horrible and sparkly splashed on you, and he'd _definitely_ be one of the few to say that this wasn't accurate. At least not at gut assumptions.

Karkat had eventually worked out a long time ago that she thought good and hard about _anything_ before she did it. Terezi just did that extremely fast and, he had to admit, didn't think about it in a way that made any remote degree of sense. At least, he hoped it was something simple like that. Trying to think like Terezi gave him a headache and left him with a feeling that he'd tied his think-pan into knots. Big, squishy and drippy knots.

(Judging by the amused look she flashed him, she'd peeked into his mind to make the comparison. Or just overheard it. She'd once mentioned that she didn't really have a lot of control over her powers below a certain threshold. _Everyone's_ thoughts and drives and their personal seeds of choices constantly leaked into Terezi's mind, turning her consciousness into a perpetually broiling stew of alien currents and competing agencies with the stone-solid core of her mind to stamp them all down and force them into the direction she wanted. When Karkat had heard about that and worked out just _why_ Terezi was very careful about how much time she spent around other people, he resolved to ease off on her. He actually managed to keep to it for at least five minutes, at which point Terezi followed him around and poked him with a stick until he shrieked.)

She'd spent a few minutes mulling over this particular notion, picking at whatever weird direction her mental processes took her in, and she finally placed a cup on the table. Karkat made damn sure he wasn't looking directly at it, the insides were murky and stained with God-knew-what and he never ever wanted to know just what Terezi put into it. He was pretty sure her can house's kitchen made explosions on its occasional travels outside Can Town when she got in the mood for some space.

"We have got to find out when the Mayor was born," Terezi said gravely. "He deserves a proper wriggling day."

Karkat didn't know what he'd been expecting. It hadn't been that. Maybe some sort of invitation to various carnal activities that were probably illegal in Alternia, utterly horrifying to humans and worthy of a raised eyebrow in Beforus. A scheme to hop to a neighboring reality and punch a giant continent-eating worm right in it's eye because hey why not? Or a proposal for a new avenue in heckling strategies. "Okay? I have to ask why."

Terezi actually looked horrified. " _Why_ does the Mayor deserve a proper wriggling day celebration?!" She hissed, the spiky hairs on her shoulders rising. "Karkat, what are these _abominable_ words coming out of your shriek-hole? The Mayor deserves _all_ the celebrations, this is just a plain fact, as plain and observable as the nubbiness of your horns and the smell of your unmentionables."

"I'm not arguing about the Mayor _deserving_ it, God no! What kind of the mealy-mouthed defecation of a swamp infested land turtle feasting upon the corpses of its failed hopes and dreams do you _take_ me for, Pyrope! This is wrong, this is blasphemy, this- wait." Karkat blinked. "You know what my crotch-garments smell like!?"

Terezi, slightly mollified, rested her face into a fist. "I know what everyone's undies smell like. Your's in particular because I am a romantic like that."

"Oh _God._ "

she leaned in, raising her hand to her mouth in a conspiratorial gesture. " _Check out the initials I left._ Now you'll never put them on the wrong way!"

"Oh sweet merciful horrors in all my dreams, they will _NEVER BE SURPASSED BY THESE IMAGES IN MY HEAD."_ Karkat trembled and unconsciously worked his legs together, face darkening to brick red as his brain shifted into different gears contemplating Terezi handling his things when he wasn't looking or if she was just making that up to muck about with his squishy thoughts and _oh god look at the way she was wiggling her eyebrows, stop this train of thought immediately._

She grinned broadly, looking masterful and a bit sinister.

Karkat headbutted the table in sorrow. "Welp, hello new paranoia fuel. Thank you _ever so much_ for this, Pyrope." He creaked his head up suspiciously at her. "Tell me again why I'm opting to share my life with you?"

Terezi chewed thoughtfully on a straw. "Because neither of us know how to do good decisions?"

"Oh, now _that's_ reassuring." Karkat pointed angrily at her. "You stay out of my personal things!"

Terezi stuck her tongue out. It almost touched Karkat and she _probably_ didn't do that on purpose. "Well now I totally want to!"

"Seriously, stop being gross!"

"No." Terezi sat back, arms folded. Smelling the betrayal and wariness in Karkat, she sighed and her hairs settled down. "Okay, okay, I don't _really_ make a habit out of breaking into your stuff and looking through your things and sewing little notes to you in your underwear."

Karkat looked at her suspiciously.

"Because I don't know how to sew. Really though, can't be that hard. It's just like... stabbing things and leaving string in there so things get stuck up." Terezi frowned. "Now that I say it, that sounds really morbid and kind of disturbing. Huh, no wonder spooky Lalonde gets into it. At least sappy Lalonde just slaps genes together and makes all kind of badass monsters roaming through Can Town."

"You're not helping your case."

"Okay, okay, _fiiine._ If you're going to be dramatic and shit about it." Terezi tried to pout on her best sincerity face. It would have sent small children and wrigglers fleeing into the caverns in mortal terror and strangely reminded the humans of old Christmas specials with creepy grinning thieves of the holidays, plotting their misdeeds out of sheer anti-Christmas grouchiness. Karkat thought it was kind of adorable but also terrifying, probably because it was Terezi doing it. "I definitely do _not_ just break into your room and go through your stuff while being a total creeper about it. Happy?"

"That doesn't rule out you breaking into my room and going through my stuff _without_ being a total creeper about it!"

"Um." Terezi raised an eyebrow. "How _do_ you break into someone's place and go through their stuff without being a creeper?"

"No damn idea. Pretty sure I watched Strider going through Lalonde's things to read a dumb wizard fiction sandwich. So like that?"

Terezi waved a finger warningly. "Don't emulate Striders without the right kind of protection gear, Vantas, that could be seriously hazardous to your health. We do _not_ grasp that kind of fine-tuned irony!"

Karkat nodded glumly. "We have yet to ascend to their ranks in the irony echelons. There are _too many damn levels_ on those ladders!"

"And I bet he could do a better wriggling day for the Mayor," Terezi said, hoping to give Karkat just the right little tweak.

"Yeah, probably," Karkat agreed. "Wait, he's not doing that, is he?"

"Not until we get him any maybe a few others roped into it!"

"Oh. Wait, we're doing that?"

Terezi gave him a look suggesting that his intelligence was _probably_ somewhere around the level of worms in the dirt, if that didn't make the worms and the dirt feel slighted by the comparison. "Not," she said with a touch of impatience. "Until we talk him into it. You follow me?"

"I, think so?" Karkat still looked puzzled. He was pretty angry about it too. "And we're doing this again why?" Terezi opened her mouth to decry his insulting the Mayor in implying he didn't deserve a birthday again. "I know where you're going and the Mayor _totally deserves all the wriggling days,_ what I'm getting at is why are we doing this right now?"

Terezi seemed a bit pleased that he was at least making a point in this direction. "It's been, hrmm." She tapped her claws on the table, tilting her head back and straight horns pointing like clock hands at the point where the ceiling met the walls. Her lips moved wordlessly as she calculated dates and time stamps and gave up on that because she couldn't make sense of the time frame the carapacians had worked out. "Okay I don't know how long it's been since we came to Can Town and started working things out for ourselves, but it's been a while. Like, what, at least a little under a sweep?"

"Close to that," Karkat said authoritatively. He had always been the best at communicating with the Mayor, with Dave coming close and Terezi learning how to grasp the Mayor's intents if not any literal translations of the languages of the carapacian chess-people and the dialects of Derse in particular. As a consequence Karkat had come around quickest to the dating system the carapacians had established, if not exactly the best at _explaining_ it to anyone. (He yelled too much for it. Teach was never going to be one of his specialties.) He explained the precise timing schemes to Terezi. At one point he got so worked out the windows shook.

Terezi's ears flattened back in self-defense. "I'm not even going to pretend I understood a word of that."

"Okay, _fine,_ doesn't even matter one little microscopic me-sized bit. I'm _already_ resigned to perpetual lifetimes of doing nothing but repeating the same stupid recitations of unbelievably basic multiple binary systems to you guys over and over and _over_ until we have to start over in yet again _another_ universe. Go figure, I'm so resigned to it I am _HARDLY EVEN COMPLAINING AT ALL!_ "

"Yeah, I know," Terezi agreed. "Give you about five minutes and by then you'll really work yourself up into the complaining stage!" She had mapped out the stages of Vantas bellowing to all its variances by tone, volume and degree of dramatic body flips. Tantrums not optional, they were included in the basic situation. (Including the actual degrees he was moving his body into.) "So, are we or are we not close to an anniversary for all the Mayor's hopes and dreams finally coming true when Can Town was established, he became mayor in a world without reigning monarchs, the different carapacians lived in peace and harmony, and other boring stuff happened?"

Karkat worked it out. "More or less."

"Okay, good!" Terezi put her hands together. Her glasses shone ominously. (She'd set up a tiny spotlight on the other side of the room in advance before the little lunch with Karkat.) "Then how does this sound to you: since we don't have any idea of when the Mayor was actually created..." She paused. "Wait. What about the day the humans started their game?"

Karkat opened his mouth in protest.

"No, no, that doesn't work," Terezi said before he could speak. "He existed in the Medium, outside time. Where days aren't really a thing. His date of existence as a thing that suddenly was isn't something you can put an exact date on, is it?"

Karkat headbutted the table again. "Oh _God_ we're getting metaphysical again, aren't we?! You stop this now. The exact instant we start bringing in relative flows of time and non-linearity in relation to communal reality strains, my brain just surrenders in abject horror and gives in to the misery of incomprehension."

"Okay, whatever." Terezi tapped a claw on the table. "The _point_ your dulcet tones keep strangling in its moment of existence is that the Mayor doesn't really have a birthday so I say we declare the anniversary of Can Town's founding his birthday."

"Oh." Karkat considered this. Much as it appealed to the universal property of the Mayor being made happy for pretty much forever, he could see a couple flaws. "We were still in the medium at that point. I think. The dating system is going to run into a few problems there too-"

"Uph, uph, uph! You can figure out the dates later!" Terezi sat back, rolling a few potential ideas into the future to see how they might work to get the outcome she wanted, and picked the best sounding one. "I need someone to plan this. Are you with me?"

Karkat cracked his knuckles. If one of the humans had been there, they might have been disturbed at how flexible his fingers were, it would have been like watching a swirly straw pushed through a funnel. "Are you sincerely giving me free reign for the planning of a wriggling day party for someone with no tradition of it, meaning there's no pre-existing circumstances to limit me? With an unrestrained budget? And _all_ the extravagance I can put into it!?"

"I... didn't say anything about budgets," Terezi said.

"Uph, uph, uph! We can talk about that later." Karkat pulled out a small electronic pad and fervently began working something out on it. Terezi listened to what he had to say after he worked out the initial plans, and vetoed them as appropriate.

* * *

The Mayor did _not_ have the fanciest, grandest and most elaborate can in all of Can Town, though it had been repeatedly offered to him and the canon in question sometimes rolled over begging for him to move in. He considered the thought of having the fanciest residence in town to be an unseemly one, however, and disdained the very idea. It was too close to kinds and queens and their many vassals and all the horrible trappings of _rulership._

Man, but he really hated anything to do with monarchies. He was actually working on getting a little dartboard made in the shape of a crown just so he could throw little fluffy novelty darts at it.

If he took note of this particular day, about a week or two in human time after Karkat and Terezi's meeting, it was hard to say. He didn't treat it particularly different from any other part of the seasonal drift.

One of the Mayor's little secrets, hidden from everyone else but the Mail Lady, was that he didn't like thinking about the past more than he had to. He'd spent enough time wandering in the desert to _try_ to put a firm patina on his memories and forget things like the smell of blood and tyrants striding upon the land, increasingly swollen with the power of prototyped sprites. The sudden, seizing certainty that _of course_ he had always been going to fail. His own suspicion, over time, that he'd been made to fail and just make another challenge for the real heroes.

Tried, but he couldn't do it. His memory was too good. Even in the desert, stumbling into the control center and looking for things to stuff into his mouth, he remembered... _everything._

He didn't talk about it much. Terezi didn't know. Dave didn't know. Even John, who'd been in that session and connected with him the most, didn't know. The Mayor _made_ sure they didn't know what had happened on that battlefield or why the Mayor had a thing about blood.

The Mail Lady knew. She'd been there. She had a right to know and she was the only one the Mayor honestly felt happy letting know about it.

So no one who knew him now understood the significance of his small, pleasant can home. Suitable for a villein, not a mayor; bigger than the home he remembered, but akin to it. A small garden around it he tended in his off-time, and now the Mayor paused in front of the scarecrow he'd put up in front of it. The pale cloth of a faded bed spread, ghostly cartoons just barely visible on it, flapping cheerfully in the wind.

The Mayor did little things like this to remember. Not forgetting about any of it was _important._

A sound made him turn; the Mayor had spent years wandering a desolate world and even longer before then on the battlefield and he had certain reflexes when it came to sudden sounds. He held it in even so, and this was easier when he saw the Mail Lady striding with the quick, smooth courier's walk she'd apparently been designed with.

He greeted her, with a kind of familiarity like they'd known each other for a lot longer than just a few years in human terms, and less than that in sweeps. Karkat had observed this and already plotted out all the many ways their clear matespriteship might develop. Nepeta, freshly arrived from the scores of the paradox ghosts freshly materialized in the world, was collaborating with him on that project.

She took a letter from her mail bag and offered it to the Mayor; she gently bent down a bit so he could take it without standing up on his tippy-toes, as she was _much_ taller than he was and it might look a bit unseemly for the Mayor to be bouncing around to receive his letters. If that actually bothered him, he'd never said so. (If the Mayor worried about looking silly, he'd probably have to seriously edit the official records of the events that led to their world's creation so no one would give him funny looks or politely ask him if uranium actually did taste good or not.)

He took the letter and squinted at it, turning it this way and that. He wasn't good at reading the language the trolls used as he was with human English, and while the writer's of the letter had firm hands, they also had large claws that kept messing up the ink. The script itself was seriously odd, smudged from constantly being passed around and taken away and back again, all while struggling for supremacy of writing the message.

(If Karkat and Terezi's typing quirks weren't already fairly similar besides the letter thing, it would have been much harder to read.)

Eventually the Mayor worked out that it read something like 'Your presence is requested at the civil hub habitance'. Also something to do with parties. And... he squinted, working it through his personal experiences and references. Something to do with date of decanting from the birthing meteor?

He asked the Mail Lady, without much hope, of a possible translation. She shrugged and managed to convey a polite bewilderment at the strange things the soft things and the big horned not-exactly-plated things got up to.

The two of them went into town, passing by suburbs and districts of cans laid out in careful placements worked out over many recreations of the smaller Can Town, looking like they'd _grown_ there. Possibly they had, taking from the minds of the heroes and the Mayor the memories of Can Town and giving it life on this young world. Closer to... not _quite_ the center of town, the patterns became a gentle spiral. The roads twisted and curved inwards to a particularly large and stately can, smaller roads leading out of it for a minimum of traffic congestion with attention to potential crashes and proper vehicle behavior.

The civil hub was a particularly nice, fancy can, larger than most of the residential cans in town. It was even made of several cans, linking together and fused into a single large mass, painted vibrant shades to make it stand out even more. Considering it's placement, significance to the remainder of the town and potential symbolism, the Serket request to make it a family home had been turned down and it had been converted into a town hall. A library, a records archive, a meeting hall, and so on and so forth; it had enough chambers within its mysterious depths for all these purposes. The Striders had independently claimed that there was also a portal to other worlds representing religious metaphors of your choice and no one had taken them up on daring to go through the portals with a blindfold on. (Assuming they weren't out to prank someone. You never knew.)

The upshot of this was that they had plenty of room in there. Lots and _lots_ of room. The Mayor noted, en route to the civic hub, that he didn't see many people walking around. The ones he did see scurried away, as if in shame. He _also_ noted some very large trucks parked outside the civic hub, and a few tantalizing puff of greenery in them.

The doors to the can swung open, as if on their own. No one walked out, and no one else was around. The Mayor glanced around fearfully and the Mail Lady drew closer, absently reaching at her side for a sword she didn't actually carry anymore.

The two of them walked forward, into the door, and walked right into a massive round chamber, mainly occupied by a truly _massive_ table piled with green food of all descriptions (the Mayor's eyes widened with joy at so much attractive food), a crowd of humans, carapacians and trolls milling around and arguing about something. The Mayor walked in, curious. The Mail Lady pulled out a small book ( _Troll and Human Customs for the Terminally Bewildered_ ) and went through it for an explanation, found at least six reasons to be deeply worried within the first five pages. and frowned as she pored through it.

There were banners. There were big fancy lights. There were shiny televisions on the walls, but those had already been there but at least they were turned to funny cartoons like the Mayor liked. Dave, sitting on a small podium and quietly editing some prefaced words Karkat had planned to deliver for at least a good forty-five minutes (because the Mayor was so cool he _deserved_ a good introduction and people being shouting at so they knew just how much they ought to respect him). This involved throwing away most of the cards and in extreme cases burning them. Dave caught sight of the Mayor and quietly turned him out of sight. "Now's not the right kinda time," he warned the two carapacians. "It'll be all dramatic and shit. Don't want to be caught up in that just yet." So he steered them to a nice little corner of the table no one was yet frequenting and left them to snack.

The Mayor was still quite confused and Dave left before he could ask anything. The Mail Lady, trying to find something helpful, pointed at a particularly large banner. The Mayor translated it as saying something about a birthday. Neither of them knew what a birthday was. But they did know a party about to happen, and a pretty convivial one at that, so they hunkered down and waited for stuff to happen.

Oblivious to the arrival of the two carapacians, Karkat was pacing around on a speaking podium, increasingly tense. "Where's the Mayor?! I _know_ I sent the spooky tall one to go bring him here, _oooh_ I knew I should have talked about this with him beforehand, I just _knew_ a surprise party was a terrible idea!"

"This whole thing was your idea," Terezi said, sitting down on a particularly strong bench and doing her best not to let on that she was fretting too.

"The party part! Our idea! Not the surprise part! Surprises are _never_ good, they always lead to god-demon dogs cutting their way out at the worst possible moment and stealing godhood from you at the last second! _John._ "

"I said I was sorry about that!" John said indignantly, floating a couple feet overhead. "And I thought we agreed that was everyone's fault retroactively, and also not. It was a screwy thing. Everything is screwy forever."

Rose was busily cutting some mint-frosted cake into perfectly symmetrical slices. Specifically for the special 'first slice of the party' for the Mayor. She did pause long enough to say, "Surprises _aren't_ always the best idea. They might not be well received."

John sputtered. "What are you _saying,_ Rose!? This is crazy talk! That is _crazy talk_ you are bringing into the world right here. If you have a special birthday party, it _has_ to be a surprise!" He folded his arms and frowned adorably. "It's a basic tenant of drama."

"He's not wrong, you know," Karkat interjected.

"Whatever," Terezi said, sniffing around anxiously. "Where _is_ he? He should have been here by now!" She paused, sniffing at the air. " _Ah..._ "

Dave leaned in, red clothes sliding in front of the Mayor as he dove in the way. Terezi blinked. Dave furiously waved his arms, trying to project 'don't do it yet' as much as he could. Terezi frowned, tilting her head, and shrugged... right up to the point where the Mayor wandered over to see what all the fuss was about. The Mail Lady had gone off to find a translator and explain what a birthday party was, and having obtained one, was now marching up with him and a stern look to demand explanations for now having informed the Mayor of this before hand.

"Dammit!" Dave said from the floor.

"Ooh!" John pointed, bounding up and down in the air. "I think I see the Mayor!"

"What!" Karkat whirled around. The Mayor waved. "Oh _dammit_ he's here! And he didn't get the little parade _or_ the fireworks _or_ the floatie dancing show or any of the things we worked out!"

"Aw!" Terezi frowned. "And now all those fireworks are going to go to waste. Unless... would a rocket chair be out of place at any point?"

"Probably," John said.

Terezi scowled. "I don't care. I'm gonna make a rocket chair anyway!"

The Mayor politely demanded an explanation. Perhaps for old time's sake, he picked up a nearby stick and poked John with it while he ordered such. Since it was the stick Terezi used to poke Karkat whenever she wanted to get his attention or was just bored, he had to pick it up with both hands and fell over almost immediately.

John knocked the stick away. "Stop that!" The Mayor made do by just poking him with a claw. "Ugh. Can someone explain to the Mayor what's going on?"

Karkat said something to the Mayor, looking incredibly disgruntled as he did. The Mayor's expression didn't change.

Roughly translated, the Mayor was told it was his birthday. This failed to make any sense to him, which occurred to Karkat. And also that he had spent over a week planning this with Terezi and had never thought to work out if the Mayor even knew what a birthday _was,_ or the significance of such.

"Surprise?" Karkat said, mostly for the benefit of the others.

The Mayor shrugged and picked up a piece of cake. Rose quickly took it from him and said, "No, no no! This piece is for _you!"_ The Mayor took it and ate it without any ceremony whatsoever. "Could perhaps someone explain to him the significance of birthdays?"

Terezi, John and Dave (having at this point gotten back to the podium) gave Karkat significant looks.

"Gonna be tricky," Karkat said doubtfully, but did his best.

In the end, the Mayor didn't _really_ understand the whole point of it, but he did know that he liked a good party with a lot of people attending and happy for him for some reason, and also lots of green food. That was definitely a bonus. The idea of it as a recurring annual thing was also pretty good, in his mind. Getting an idea from some of the movies he'd watched (recovered from human timelines), he danced with the Mail Lady on the assumption that you did things like that at a party. And then, in accordance with the Mayor setting general policy, several other people danced too.

Karkat and Terezi... explicitly did not. The idea of dancing in front of everyone frightened them both. Karkat didn't like the idea of possibly getting stepped on, and Terezi was mortified at the thought of doing the stepping. But they _did_ eat a lot of cake and sit in a nice quiet corner without people paying too much attention to them.

At least until the Mayor somehow got them to dance anyway. He was persuasive like that. But he had the courtesy to let them get their dance jitters out somewhere away from too much public sight. (Dave still took pictures.)


	9. Scraping over the Sound of Swindles

Another submission for Karezi Week in July of 2016! Today's theme was 'Couch'.

I had a pretty difficult time with the previous ones, mostly because I think I was trying too hard to the point that it wasn't easy and it was kind of difficult to get it going. This time I decided to try a brief cute snippet instead of something more complex, and it worked a lot better. Interestingly enough, I feel like I got a good handle on their relationship this time!

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck. This story is purely a work of entertainment without monetary gain.

* * *

The couch was big, the couch was squishy, and the couch was quite possibly _the most comfortable couch_ to have ever existed. Can Town had at least twenty. By astonishing coincidence more than half of all the young gods who had survived SBURB and it's variants (including the people who had been resurrected in the moment Can Town had existed, much to their bewilderment and Vriska's frustrated disappointment at _not_ dying a totally kickass death) had all alchemized incredibly nice cushions, chairs and other such things at various times.

In the beginning of Can Town, as they figured out which of their alchemized gear to recreate as the most useful and easily understood technologies, their _IMPOSSIBLY NICE CUSHION_ technology had quickly become industry standard. (If they had industries. They didn't yet.) Consequently, everyone had a couch, sofa, mattress or cocoon equally fitting the title of the most comfy thing in existence.

Terezi and Karkat had one sized up for their particular specifications. It was big enough for Terezi to sit in, and the cushions so soft that Karkat could just sit on them and start sinking in. In fact he'd actually adopted the human customs of a mattress and used his couch cushions as a baseline for them. The problem was, Terezi worked out, that the cushions were _so_ comfortably and squishy it was easy to slip when moving around on them if you weren't careful.

She was being careful at the moment, but not with the media-shrine remote. It slipped from Terezi's hands as she did her best to scoot closer to Karkat without him noticing. She didn't drop it on purpose but she _was_ doing her best to squeeze up with him without actually looking like she was doing it and that would have been tricky enough with a troll roughly her size. Given the package of mutations that made Terezi who she was (and was apparently bundled up in the Pyrope package, based on her ancestor's own garb and teenage self), this generally would only have been a Peixes, _maybe_ an especially large indigo or violet. Karkat, on the other hand, was small. So very, _very_ small.

He was so small that it actually worried Terezi a lot just how startlingly small he really was. The first time she'd met him in person, it sincerely _scared_ her that he was so small and built so frail, almost like what she now considered human levels of 'how have you even survived this long'. Thin limbs and blunt claws and a body so compact it was like he was constantly curling in on himself. Prickly hair still too soft to defend from bites. An armored skull, his nubby horns the largest of accumulated lumps (And on his ancestor, a crown of thorns) and that was probably the hardest point on him and still so miserably _thin._

It was important that she didn't actually let it show in front of him; Karkat was about as defensive as the little shelled claw-monsters he'd modeled himself after and he did _not_ like shows of pity outside of closed doors, she'd worked out just how long he'd hidden his painful little secrets away from anyone and vulnerability just still plain scared him. Terezi understood the feeling. It was less than a shout's distance from weakness, like putting a target in the back of your head and screaming for anything in a uniform to go murder-stabbing cull on you.

Terezi hadn't been scared of being culled, exactly. She'd calmly worked out that she would probably be culled the moment they found her; _maybe_ they'd decide that her blood was enough to get her a slight reprieve, maybe her smell-based acuity was better enough than sight to let her off. Probably not and she'd die or find another way out. (Fantasies of leading a revolution against the condescending tyranny with Karkat as her loyal and shrieking matesprite had figured prominently.) But Terezi couldn't remember ever really being _scared_ and it bothered her a lot. Like hearing noises in your appliance that meant it was already broken and you didn't understand it enough to know that maybe there wasn't any point in trying to fix it, ever.

Karkat hadn't ever worried about being hatched broken, even if he'd been born scared and destined to die if he didn't flee from tyrian sights. She didn't know if she actually _admired_ that, envied it, or had other feelings she didn't have words for. It was probably mushy and disgusting in that horrible sappy way she didn't like to admit she felt on a more or less consistent basis. She had a reputation to maintain. Karkat possibly panicking and skulking away in dread of serious relationship woes was another factor.

Terezi licked her lips nervously. Her snout wrinkled and her hairs rose up and down her back like quills. She fancied maybe also like a dragon trying to settle it's wings. Carefully she slid closer to Karkat and tried to do it without eclipsing him, actually touching him and ruining the whole plan, or pushing him off the couch. In the resulting muscular concentration, the remote slid away from her hands and bounced between the cushions, where it was lost forevermore. (Or until they asked Rose to find it. Light shone forth even in mysterious cushion depths.)

Karkat was glancing at her, trying to keep an eye on what was actually happening on the TV. It was tricky: Terezi's proximity tended to draw his focus, and likewise. He was vaguely sure that there was a commercial. Something to do with a big sneaky-looking robot hawking... God he didn't even know. Some kind of sausages? Delivered straight to your door and Karkat didn't want any no matter how simple the delivery, those were some _suspicious_ looking sausages and probably made from former customers by the look of the salesbot, he'd seen enough of these commercials to overhear the name 'Swindle' and _god_ if that wasn't a suspicious name, _oh wait_ Terezi was definitely leaning over a with a fierce look, welp there went his ability to concentrate on shifty salesbots.

The remote sank into the mysterious depths of the couch. Perhaps there was a portal there to strange realms and eldritch mysteries, and there the remote was taken by the denizens thereof and attempted to be made a weapon. Rose never did elaborate on it. Thereafter, it passed out of their recollection until Rose brought it back, and bore no more relevance to the things transpiring upon the couch.

Karkat straightened up, supportive strain of exoskeleton flexed stiff while Terezi almost slipped on the impossibly smooth cushions. Her hand slammed down next to him, pushed deep, and with an effort she moved herself up into a sitting position again, much closer to him. She wasn't sitting straight up; she was so much larger than Karkat that if she did he wouldn't be able to reach her face, or she bend down to his level. Thus were the complications of troll romance.

Delicately, like he was made of gossamar-thin glass and gemstones as easily broken as eggshells in a hurricane, Terezi put a hand beside him. She considered how to approach it, and delicately grasped his thigh, her heavy palm lightly touching him, almost supporting her as she leaned down like she was going to lay her head on him.

Their horns tapped together as she raised her head up, face to face with him. Her horns were not especially big relative to her, and they were quite light, perhaps with hollow chambers through their considerable length. Her horns were growing exceptionally longer as she got older and Karkat had declared himself the one solely responsible for trimming her horns so she didn't get stuck in doors like Tavros did. His horns, though; they were short but they were _thick,_ compacted like plates of armor around their layers, and when their horns touched it was with an audible click and pleasant vibrations in the cranial plates on their foreheads.

Terezi considered a lick, spying through the turns of decisions to see if it was a bad idea or not. Karkat firmed himself up and kissed her cheek, blushing furiously the whole time.

A small teal flush spread on her cheek where his mouth had. The brilliant heat of his body met with the coolness of her high blood. Her blind eyes opened wide in a stupefied blink and Karkat wiggled in his seat, sinking deeper into the cushions with abject and possibly terminal feelings of 'how do we proceed'. Perhaps for the best, instead of shying away with bluster like he might have when he was younger, he stayed there and waited.

Terezi lowered her head, nuzzling him horns-to-horns. "These levels of cuteness are positively _illegal,_ Vantas," Terezi murmured, Karkat shifting his head peacefully so that the blunt edges of his horns scraped nicely against the bases of the small hornlets swelling along the sides of her horns. Bits of molt fluttered down around their necks.

Karkat sighed dreamily, sidling his side into her arm and resting against her as much as he was into the couch. "It's _adora_ bloodthirsty, thank you."

"You're about as bloodthirsty as..." Terezi chuckled cruelly as she dug her horns into a particularly stubborn molt spot. "Shit, Egbert."

Karkat might have actually been offended even as recently at the meteor. He'd grown up a lot since then. "Like I care," he mumbled, his usual inability to stop a full-blown ramble halted in his tracks but the warm sensations going in his head and rippling down his back, causing his hairs to wave like tides in motion.

Terezi tilted her head up as Karkat shifted his face against her neck, kissing the join of her jaws with only the slight nick of his massive blunt fangs. She barely felt it and what little she felt, seemed natural. He hugged her arm as tightly as he could, and she drew as close to him as she could.


	10. Choice In Families

Karkat, Terezi, and Dave have a thoughtful nature on the families you get stuck with and the families you chose. While drowning in grub-babies.

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck or any copyrighted materials present.

* * *

"Y'know, it's weird how none of us really get to choose the way our families get us," Terezi said, claws deftly working needles. She was pretty much skilled at anything she'd ever turned her paws to; a Pyrope trait, to excel at any task they felt obliged to try and they would _always_ master it in record time. Only the Amporas took it to bigger extremes. Terezi, after much painstaking instruction from Rose, had gotten good at needlework.

Dave had to raise an eyebrow at that; barely noticeable under his shades, but she definitely knew. "Really, now," he said with an affected _lack_ of any tone at all that, despite his best efforts, accentuated the wariness. Any talks about family could go down very bad roads that neither he, nor Dirk or Hal, wished to be addressed these days. "That really that weird, Teez? Nobody really gets to pick your family."

This got a gruff snort from the the floor. Terezi paused in her weaving of fabric to turn her head towards Karkat, laying down on the ground in a pile of grubs. Infant trolls, perhaps less than a few months old each, all almost the same age down to a few seconds from crawling out of the slurry. They mostly looked alike; similar patterns of horns – mostly not very long, fairly thin but strong – and came in several shades of the castes. A couple were the recently emerged shade of lime, and they looked the most like Karkat. A few were teal, at least two were bright cherry red, and some of the outlying oddities were shades that didn't match up to either one of them. Dave expected jades, olives or even violets to start cropping up. It was like every time he turned his back, _new_ grubs were showing up and squeaking for attention.

"That's just goddamn bullshit, Strider," Karkat said archly, doing his best to look dignified with multiple grubs crawling over his body like throw pillows made of wiggle, and failing miserably. One was curled up smugly against his chest, and another was hopefully biting his hair. What it was hoping for, it was anyone's guess. "You know it and I know it and Terezi knows it, this damn little child right here on my head knows it and she doesn't know anything. Besides she should _know hair is not edible in the slightest, you stop that you bad baby!_ " The grub yawned in disinterest, curling up into a ball and rolling against his side. "'You can't choose your family', don't be dense. We sure as hell did, didn't we?"

A thoughtful pause filled the room.

"Suppose we did," Terezi said, a bit cheered up by the thought. "But... I dunno. Dumb thought, I guess. I just thought it was weird that with both our species, with all the differences in how we raise babies and educate them and live our lives, we still have that in common. Not much choice with who you get stuck with."

"...Yeah. It sucks," Dave said, very cautiously. "Like, a metric shit-ton. That was a real measurement on Earth. Totally was. I am not bullshitting you here, I can almost definitely promise you, we came up with that one to calculate how much tonnage could be taken up when an elephant just squatted down on innocent bands of wandering accountants and were just being complete bastards about it so they-"

Karkat's noise wrinkled. "Knock it off, jackass, you'll spoil the kids taste for swearing!"

"Eh," Terezi said. "We could do with a bit less damn cursing in this household, ya hear me?" She paused to sniff at her needlework. It was a grub-shaped bundle of cloth, suitable to hold a grub like a little sweater, complete with straps to tie around an adult troll's body, and stretchy enough to accommodate them as the grubs matured until they reached pupation age. It might also make a good bag for some bread.

Bit of a shame that Terezi's taste in fabric still resembled a zebra made out of plaid and neon lighting that had been fed into an anvil factory, _backwards._ Dave recoiled in horror from the bright colors.

"I like it," Karkat said loyally. "It's pretty."

Terezi smirked, smugly.

"Okay," Dave said, getting back on track. "But I _think_ I get what Terezi was talking about. Human kids were adopted or born into existing families. Troll kids got culled by their... their loogies."

" _Lusii,_ you insensitive jackass!" Karkat hollered. Some of the grubs hissed supportively. One of them yawned in Dave's general direction.

"He's doing that on purpose, Kar, don't feed the small squishy's thirst for aggravation," Terezi said, doing more knitting.

"Yeah, those things," Dave said, unbothered. "Either way, you get saddled with caretakers that may or may not... uh." He paused, and it was a very delicate pause. Like one of those old fancy, expensive egg-things on old Earth, but this could crack at any moment, and give birth to crawling horrors he did not wish to see again.

Terezi's arm, seemingly moving on automatic, reached out and grasped his forearm reassuringly. She was so much bigger than him, the swell of her hip alone towering over him even while she was sitting and he was standing up, that her palm engulfed his entire arm. Yet her cool touch was reassuring; Dave visibly calmed down. He breathed in, out, and she gave him another gentle squeeze.

"May not be _right_ to be around a kid," Terezi said gently, picking up the thread in his head. It was the sort of thread that was probably on fire and burning to the touch.

"Yeah," Dave said mournfully. "Like that." He stared at the ground, resolving to go forward, and plunged through with it. "Hell, look at Vriska. Her mom was... messed up. And Gamzee's goat-dad thing was barely ever round, way Karkat tells it." Karkat nodded, gazing with concern at Dave and gauging if he was Okay. And Feferi basically had to run a whole gamut with Eridan to keep her mom from waking up and ending the world... before she actually did, I mean. Lot of stress to put on a kid."

Terezi shrugged. "That's the way it was on Alternia. A lot of coldbloods had to do more caretaking than their lusii were able to give in return. And warmblood lusii had... other issues, a lot." She said this in the calm way of someone who, in her youth, had thought about this a _lot_ and plotted to dismantle the entire system that demanded it be like this. "I've been looking into Beforus. Their culling system; they still had lusii, but they also had some trolls that _cared_ for wigglers. Bit like your and Kanaya's ancestors, Karkat."

Karkat considered this; the idea of a troll caring for wigglers was a revolutionary one but getting more commonplace. "You mean like the way they were on Alternia... or the ones we actually _met_?"

There was another pause. "That sounds potentially, uh, _super_ squicky," Dave said, sticking his tongue out. "Like... her being in _that_ kind of a caretaker relationship while they're both hate-flirting with each other 24/7? That's... that's messed up, man."

Karkat and Terezi looked at each other and shrugged. They did not question this, even if they didn't really understand Dave's problems; some things just did _not_ translate well. "The point," Terezi said firmly, carefully edging away from the subject. "Is that what we're planning here... I dunno. Might work better than just turning kids loose with lusii and leaving them to fend for themselves." She didn't need to emphasize that Alternia was a profoundly unnatural state of being, a world of perpetual warfare and misery orchestrated to make their specific generation strong enough to win SGRUB. Strength, in her opinion, was overrated. If you wanted to see trolls as they _really_ were, without jackass cherubs and their puppet minions constantly bringing out the very worst of them and making that the _standard_ for social behavior and government models... you needed to examine Beforus. That was trolls as they would have been.

"Yeah, I'm just gonna pretend I know what you're getting at, nod a lot and accept the life you've laid out for us," Karkat said, laying back on the ground and lifting a grub with a grumpiness that Terezi grinned at, knowing full well that this was Vantas cheerfulness.

"You do that, Kar," she said, mouth wide and toothy.

"If it becomes common place, you could end up with the same... uh, _issues_ on Earth," Dave said warily.

"See? That's why you're here," Terezi said. "Telling me about these things so I know what to avoid when I draft the legal stuff for it."

Dave contemplated the possibility that Bro had wound up being the man he was for just that exact purpose, to make Dave the kind of guy who would be wary of potentially destructive guardians, and he thought he was better off not thinking about that. Terezi winced at this thought, and Dave quickly changed the subject. "I, uh..." he looked at the grubs, and got some inspiration, as well as a legitimate question.

It was blatantly obvious _whose_ grubs they were, or at least the primary donors of the slurry that produced them. Karkat and Terezi were doing their very best to add numbers to overall troll population, and do their part in repopulating their species. Dave privately suspected that they were trying to set some sort of record; outdo whoever the troll equivalent of Genghis Khan or whoever would have had a huge amount of direct descendants. "I thought you needed the Mother Grub or whatever to get troll babies," he said. "These guys, I know damn well they didn't come from that spawning pool. Where the heck have they been coming from?"

Terezi coughed, looking embarrassed or caught in the act of some culturally damning act of Things Man Was Not Meant To Do. Karkat looked carefully at the ceiling, not looking at Dave. "We, um." Terezi coughed again, and focused on the knitting. "We found a way. Took a lot of work. A _lot_ of work."

"That's an innuendo, isn't it."

"Not in front of the kids," Terezi said mildly.


	11. Makeup, A Kiss, A Treehouse

I do not own Homestuck and do not make any monetary value from this work.

* * *

The wind blew, hard and strong and it was like a memory, of a distant time, and the smell was _like_ something from Alternia, but not. Some other alien thing, hints of a world they helped make in another time, another place, when they were both younger and dumber and not exactly ready to hold hands and dive horn-first into hearts like wrigglers about to bite something that was gonna bite back a lot harder-

But Alternia. SGRUB. Everything else, every dumb mistake in other timelines only remembered strongly when Terezi is close, it could have been a thousand sweeps ago or just two or three. It felt the same. Distant and lost and not really either of their problem anymore. Old hurts, old faults and old wounds just... faded away. Bad blood draining out a wound, and the scars healed just fine, and the infection was long since gone.

Karkat smelled the air, his eyes closed, doing it as _she_ did. He did his best to pretend that he was totally getting this crap, he was understanding the lessons of dragons like someone who wasn't built mostly of bullshit and yelling real loud, but he felt something on the wind, a taste of something that noses couldn't tell you and eyes wouldn't help with. A memory carried on that wind, from some other person, a flash of emotions he'd never felt and thoughts he'd never imagined on himself. A scrabbling, dirt-low thought that moved in a mind as fast as a river and about as complicated, excited and too quick to worry much about consequences.

Terezi sniffed the air too, her lips quirking into an odd smile, threatening to go full grin. "I know what it is," she said, sing-song, words rising up and down with her rumbling, deep voice in a way that was absolutely _terrifying_ and enormously attractive. With Terezi, the two things blended together. She was all claws and spiky quill-hair and teeth that could bite his arm in half at the elbow and she wanted to keep him _alive_ and shit that really meant a lot. On Alternia, in the meteor, on this new world.

( _Maybe they had a chance in another time line to get close on the meteor. Maybe they screwed that up. Maybe they'd drifted apart in this timeline for a while, but yeah, okay, this was an new world. A new chance, a new places; she'd promised him she'd seen all the possibilities of old timelines, and this was a new world. A new place. A new chance, and she sealed it with a kiss between his horns, soft as falling leaves on water._

 _Then they both fucked it up because he poked her in the eye with his horn and she thought he did it on purpose so she headbutted him and that ended up with them both falling into a pile of leaves and_ _ **holy fuck**_ _she was heavy and for some reason they were both laughing. So that was okay._ )

"Okay, fine, I give up, what the shit, don't drag out the suspense." Karkat tilted his head up, and up, and up some more at the room filling _glory_ that was Terezi Pyrope, sitting down with her legs crossed and sickle-shaped toeclaw cutting a weird spiral into the wood floor. Dammit. She was grinning. "You're gonna drag it out. Aren't you?"

"Hell yeah." She grinned, lips mostly a deep black a few shades darker than the beautiful obsidian tone of her chitin, tinted teal at the seam lines artfully inscribed into her chitin to state her lineage and story. Those lips, full and thick and entirely capable of making his whole face grossly moist with a single overexcited smooch, were half painted teal. Karkat fumbled with the tools in his hands, impatient to finish the job. "Guess what it is."

"Come on, tell me!"

"Nah. It's cheating. Guess!"

Karkat grumbled but he complied, casting his power into the air, feeling it tightly. He felt the flow of the grass and the echoes of seeds from a thousand years ago. He felt how this forest had grown, planted ages ago, and he felt the edges of words spoken hundreds of years before that, shaping minds that would come to speak other words that led one day to people coming here and placing down seeds, and then a seed became this tree, and here they came, putting up a tree house and staying there, together, free and safe like he'd never been, and she wasn't alone like she'd always been.

He knew blood, and all the things it flowed through. Blood wasn't just life-juice in veins. Blood was will, life, _unity,_ and he knew it well.

He felt the air, and he understood the memory upon the wind, something that never would have survived Alternia. He sniffed. "Consort?" he guessed. Cold thoughts, excitable but also inclined towards the depths, fond of sand and water, looking for a beach to build a home, and with a hint of rain to its memory... "Turtle. One of Lalonde's, I think? Rose's turtles. One of her consorts."

Terezi nodded sagely. "Yep! Ya got it." She grinned again, and wiggled her clawed fingers impishly. "I'm _this_ close to being proud of you." Her fingers were held apart a fraction of an inch apart. " _Thiiiis_ close."

"Put those fingers closer so I can bite them." He gnashed his teeth in mock-threat.

"What, and risk you busting your cute little wanna-be fangs on me?" She scoffed, and stuck her alarmingly long tongue out at him. It smacked him in the face. "No way! I like your teeth. Wanna keep them nice and intact so I can put them on a necklace if anything happens to you."

"You're the soul of romance," Karkat said dryly, wiping off a bit of spittle.

Terezi wound her tongue back. "I know!" It was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic and really good at hiding it, or if she was being sincere. Probably the latter, she was smiling too much for it to be one of her attempts to hide her real feelings.

"...I could bust out a few of my teeth so you could have a necklace?" Karkat said, feeling like he ought to at least _try_ to make her sense of style look like she wanted.

"What?" She blinked.

"There's probably a hammer around here. I could take a couple whacks-"

"What, _no._ " her hands clasped his cheeks, eclipsing his head. "I forbid you to take any implements of smackery to your teeny, adorable face muffin!" she paused. "The hell is a face muffin... WHATEVER, don't tell anyone I said that!"

"Can I tell them you're being protective?" he mumbled. "It's kind of... oh god, please don't put me in a toilet or something, I have to say this-"

"Don't you dare!"

"It's kind of cute you being all protective."

"OKAY FIRST OF ALL HOW DARE YOU." She scooted back, arms crossed and her head tilted up to hide that she was blushing very heavily. "I! Am a _totally badass troll,_ I have more badass in this pinky claw than you do in your whole body."

He snorted, not disputing it. "Well, _duh._ " He considered her neck, bearing a little charm on it with the symbol of his ancestor upon it, worn in secret throughout her childhood as her own ancestor had done. "Some of my teeth would look pretty good on that necklace. Hold on, let me find that hammer-"

Her arm curled around him. "No!"

"Let me be badass, dammit!"

"No way!"

"They'll grow right back, probably?"

"No!" Terezi crossed her arms, tugging Karkat into her lap and scowling so fiercely that it was surprising that some of the tree house didn't light aflame from her glare.

"Ugh, _fine._ " Karkat curled up against her thigh, her arm and her stomach. It was really comfortable there and despite how damn strong she was, very soft. He poked her stomach. "You feel like a recuperacoon."

She giggled despite herself, trying to cover her mouth. "Knock it off, you little shit-goblin!"

"Poke, poke!"

" _Swear to your ancestor I will crush you between my thighs, you know I can!_ "

He paused, leaning against her, contemplating this. Terezi relaxed around him, leaning back and rumbling pleasantly as his head soaked into her. "Is that, uh." He nuzzled her stomach, horns lightly sliding against her skin. "Is that honestly a deterrent."

"Suppose that depends on how threatened you are," she said, with a faint smile she wouldn't ever show so easily except around friends. But here, now, her personas were allowed to slip, and she got to show the ones she could without worrying about image. She patted at her mouth. "So is this stuff done, or what?"

"Oh, your lip paint and shit." Karkat was quite comfortable where he was, but if she needed him to do a thing, then oh well for that. "No. Gotta finish it up." he tried to scramble free.

"Oh, come on!" She hunched over, scowling as Karkat loped slowly on all fours to the paint kit, most of them in shades of blue and green, and glowing faintly.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, quite unconcerned. "I haven't even finished with the base layer, you _know_ there needs to be something for it all to be on before I apply the subtle bits."

"And then the glowy stuff that looks cool?" she said, without really expecting it to be over so quickly.

"Sorry, that comes later. The face paint too, if you want to sit still for that long."

"Ugh." Terezi sat back, quite enjoying the feel of his hands on her face. " _Fine, I GUESS._ "

Karkat mixed them up as appropriate. Terezi leaned in, so he could take a soft brush, painted teal, and slide it in slow, lovely strokes across her lips, making them a bright teal one stroke at a time.

Minutes passed in this way, soft and calm and gentle. Neither of them had a lot of time for the passionate, soul-searing kind of love. Passion had its charms, yeah, but, right here and now-

It was good to just have things be soft, be sweet and quiet. To trust, and to be in love without worrying at all.

Terezi smacked her lips. Karkat grunted in annoyance but left her to it. "One of these days," he said, patiently keeping at it, admiring the artistic effect of her lips against the chitin. "You could learn to do this yourself."

"What, and not have my personal mutant attendant do it for me? That sounds boring."

He mumbled, almost missing a stroke when his hands shook, and he couldn't stop himself from smiling.

More time passed, the two of them together like this and Terezi gently moved a hand up, trailing his side and studying the shape of his shoulder, moving up. He hummed gently as her claws lovingly moving up the side of his face, then towards his horns, cradling the back of his head and just sliding in and out, into his hair and out, and he resisted the urge to purr. She didn't, her blind eyes closed and her mouth smiling softer than she dared to show in public, and her contented rumbles made a few windows shake and leaves fall out.

"So, uh." She was still smiling, her eyes closed. "If I kissed you know, would it totally just screw up everything you did?"

"What, _shit really?_ " He thought about it, the first impulse being something along the lines of ' _hell yeah Pyrope go for it'._ "Well, shit, if you wanna, I'm not gonna stop you." Her mouth was very inviting, the curved blades of her teeth beauteously fierce.

Terezi made a _pfft_ noise. "It's not fun if you don't whine a little first!" She leaned closer to him, looming over him like a dragon over its most treasured hoard. "But. I think I can deal with it."

Her lips brushed against him, cool and soft, gentle as tree roots finding purchase in the most verdant of soil. He leaned into the kiss, his heat warming her kiss and it remained smooth ad calm, as steady as something they both had so desperately needed, and now it was here, and it was _safe_ and yes, this was love, not the kind of thing either of them had thought they needed with so many movies telling them that love was hot and wild and ended in blood.

There is a kind of beauty in peace, and in not being afraid anymore.

Terezi parted, it felt like years later than neither of them noticed. Karkat didn't bother to clean up the teal, because he could still feel her breath on him and the smell of her on his face, and _hell no_ to just wiping that off. Instead he blushed, head tilted up and throat bared, and in such a position he was well equipped to kiss on the cheek.

She didn't giggle, or laugh, or rumble, but she did sigh contently, putting an arm up to loosely hug him.

All was right and well, for both.


End file.
